AWS CloudOps Engineer – Associate: Operational Essentials

Build practical AWS operations skills through a focused, intermediate-level course aligned with AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate preparation. Practice monitoring, troubleshooting, reliability, deployment automation, security, networking, and cost management through explanations, labs, and a capstone. This eight-hour course provides targeted preparation rather than exhaustive certification coverage.

Level: intermediate · 24 lessons · about 8 h · Free · AI-assisted course created by Sandip Das

What you will learn

• Configure operational monitoring, logs, and actionable alerts for an AWS workload.
• Diagnose common compute, storage, and network connectivity problems using AWS operational evidence.
• Implement backup, recovery, and availability measures appropriate to a workload's recovery objectives.
• Deploy and update a small AWS workload using infrastructure as code and operational automation.
• Apply least-privilege access, audit logging, and basic operational security controls.
• Identify resource waste and recommend cost and performance improvements.
• Operate a small AWS workload in a capstone and explain decisions using certification-style scenarios.

Course outline

1. Operational Foundations and Security

Establish a safe sandbox and apply identity, encryption, and audit controls before operating a workload.

1. Operational Responsibilities and a Safe Sandbox (20 min) · free preview
   Use a workload diagram and certification-style scenario to establish responsibilities, sandbox boundaries, spending cautions, and cleanup expectations.
2. Least-Privilege Access and Access-Denied Diagnosis (20 min)
   Work through a scoped IAM policy example and an S3 denial, using the requesting principal and applicable policy layers as evidence.
3. Audit Evidence, Encryption, and Secure Maintenance (20 min)
   Build a compact security baseline covering CloudTrail, KMS and secret access, and scheduled patching rather than unrestricted credentials or ad hoc changes.

2. Repeatable Deployment and Operational Automation

Deploy a small workload with CloudFormation, investigate failed changes, and choose appropriate Systems Manager automation.

1. Deploy a Small Workload with CloudFormation (20 min)
   Use a guided template and architecture diagram to deploy the sandbox workload with explicit parameters, permissions, and a cleanup path.
2. Update a Stack and Diagnose Deployment Failure (20 min)
   Make a bounded template change, interpret stack events, and plan recovery and deletion without losing required data.
3. Operate Managed Nodes with Systems Manager (20 min)
   Verify managed-node prerequisites and compare Run Command, State Manager, and Automation through a small, reversible maintenance task.

3. Monitoring, Logging, and Actionable Alerts

Instrument the deployed workload, test alert routing and evaluation, and investigate a controlled incident using operational evidence.

1. Collect Workload Metrics and Logs (20 min)
   Configure a focused CloudWatch agent example and inspect the resulting metrics and logs while limiting unnecessary telemetry spend.
2. Create and Test Actionable Alarms (20 min)
   Connect a workload metric to an alarm and notification path, distinguishing notification tests from real threshold evaluation.
3. Investigate a Controlled Workload Incident (20 min)
   Use a bounded CPU-stress example or prepared evidence to practice an incident timeline, metric and log correlation, remediation, and verification.

4. Compute and Storage Troubleshooting

Use health checks and storage evidence to diagnose EC2, EBS, and S3 operational failures without destructive guesswork.

1. Diagnose EC2 Health and Management Failures (20 min)
   Compare system, instance, and storage-related health evidence with boot logs and Systems Manager status to isolate a failure.
2. Expand EBS Storage Without Confusing Disk and Filesystem (20 min)
   Use a guided command walkthrough to compare block-device and filesystem sizes, protect the data, and verify a supported expansion.
3. Investigate S3 Lifecycle and Replication Behavior (20 min)
   Read versioning, lifecycle, replication status, and permission evidence to explain why data remains stored or fails to replicate.

5. Network Connectivity and Name Resolution

Trace workload traffic through routes, security controls, DNS, and load-balancer health checks using configuration and flow evidence.

1. Trace Routes, Security Controls, and Return Traffic (20 min)
   Annotate public and private paths and use VPC Flow Logs and Reachability Analyzer to distinguish configuration blockers from application symptoms.
2. Diagnose Private DNS and Endpoint Connectivity (20 min)
   Resolve split-view DNS and managed-node endpoint scenarios by checking VPC DNS settings, zone matching, and HTTPS reachability.
3. Troubleshoot Application Load Balancer Health Checks (20 min)
   Follow the health-check request and return path before testing application paths, response codes, and timeouts.

6. Availability, Backup, and Recovery

Choose availability and recovery mechanisms from workload objectives and validate both resource restoration and application usability.

1. Design Availability and Health-Based Replacement (20 min)
   Compare Multi-AZ patterns, Auto Scaling health sources, and replacement policies using an availability-versus-capacity scenario.
2. Translate Recovery Objectives into a Recovery Strategy (20 min)
   Turn a business outage scenario into explicit RTO and RPO targets and a justified recovery design.
3. Configure Backup and Validate Recovery (20 min)
   Work through a guided backup-and-restore exercise or supplied restore evidence, checking service support, key access, elapsed recovery time, and application data.

7. Cost, Performance, and Operational Readiness

Identify waste, evaluate performance-aware improvements, and prepare a concise operational checklist and scenario knowledge check.

1. Find Cost Drivers and Set Budget Alerts (20 min)
   Use a guided cost-analysis example to group spend, assign ownership, and configure notifications without treating a budget as a real-time spending cap.
2. Recommend Performance-Aware Resource Optimization (20 min)
   Assess an EC2 recommendation and a workload cost case, balancing utilization, performance risk, capacity headroom, and data-retention requirements.
3. Review Readiness and Practice Operational Scenarios (20 min)
   Assemble a compact runbook and cheat sheet, then use certification-style and interview-style questions to justify decisions across the covered domains.

8. Integrated Workload Operations Capstone

Operate the existing sandbox workload through a controlled change, incident, and recovery check, then present evidence and remove chargeable resources.

1. Capstone: Deploy an Observable, Secured Workload (20 min)
   Reuse the course template and sandbox rather than start a new architecture, and capture baseline deployment, access, telemetry, and readiness evidence.
2. Capstone: Diagnose an Incident and Validate Recovery (20 min)
   Apply one approved sandbox fault, investigate it with the practiced evidence workflow, and validate recovery using the existing backup exercise or supplied restore evidence.
3. Capstone: Defend Decisions and Verify Cleanup (20 min)
   Present a short operational evidence pack, answer scenario questions, recommend one cost-performance improvement, and complete a dependency-aware cleanup checklist.

Start the course on LearnXops