Hello, Cloud Gurus and welcome to AWS This Week.
And there are some very exciting announcements this week,
including the new AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam is
now in general availability.
Workload consolidation is now available for Karpenter,
and you can now take crash-consistent snapshots of a subset
of EBS volumes using a single API call.
You're watching AWS This Week with me Faye Ellis
This week saw the launch of the new AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam
SAA-C03. And the previous version of the exam SAA-C02
is no longer available.
Many of you have been asking us about the content of the new exam and the good
news is that it is very similar to the previous exam. In fact,
90% of the topics in SAA-C03 were also
in SAA-C02,
and the new exam still consists of 65 multiple choice and multiple response
questions. You have 130 minutes to complete the questions.
And the passing score is still 720 out of 1000.
And the exam domain still focused on designing AWS architecture
for security, resilience, performance, and cost optimization.
The main difference between the old and new exam is the additional coverage of
a number of machine learning and AI services from AWS.
All of these services are now listed in the latest exam guide and
its services like Comprehend, Forecast, Fraud Detector, Kendra,
Lex, Polly, Rekognition, SageMaker, Textract,
Transcribe, and Translate. And before you start panicking,
just remember that this is an associate level exam, and it's not a deep dive.
So recognizing what the service is, its purpose,
and having a practical understanding of its use will assist you in your
preparation for this exam. And to help you out,
we have created a handy comparison guide comparing the old and new exam in
detail, and you'll find a link to that below.
But rest assured that Ryan is busy working on the course updates right now with
the aim to have the new lessons completed in early Q4.
Workload consolidation is now available for Karpenter.
And if you haven't used Karpenter before,
it's an open source Kubernetes cluster autoscaler that helps improve
application availability and operational overhead by scaling your
cluster, based on the cluster workload.
And you can use Karpenter with EKS service or any other
conformant Kubernetes cluster.
So if you are using Kubernetes in any form, then you need to know about this.
Now, as the workloads in a Kubernetes cluster increase,
it can be necessary to launch new EC2 instances to cope with the increased
workload. However, over time,
these instances can become underutilized. For example,
if workloads scale down or they get removed from the cluster,
and this is where workload consolidation comes in.
So it will automatically identify opportunities to reschedule these
workloads onto a set of more cost efficient EC2 instances,
saving you money and reducing your carbon footprint as well.
So with version 0.15 And above,
Karpenter will automatically consolidate your Kubernetes workloads onto
smaller EC2 instances,
helping you to increase your compute utilization and lowering your costs as
well.
You can now take crash-consistent snapshots of a subset of
EBS volumes attached to an EC2 instance, using a single API call.
And EBS snapshots are point-in-time copies of EBS volumes.
They're stored on S3, and they're commonly used to back up your critical data.
Now previously creating multi-volume EBS snapshots involved
creating snapshots of all of the EBS volumes attached to an instance. However,
this approach is not always desirable. For example,
you may have volumes which contain temporary data that doesn't need to be backed
up. So with this change,
you can now choose to snapshot only that EBS volumes that you want to,
and still use a single API call simplifying the management of your
snapshots and also saving you money. Well that's all for this week.
Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus, take care of yourselves,
and I'll look forward to seeing you soon.