Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- Determine high-performing and/or scalable storage solutions.
- Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions.
- Determine high-performing database solutions.
- Determine high-performing and/or scalable network architectures.
- Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions.
Executive Summary
- Performance on AWS is about selecting the right service for the right workload. Every storage, compute, database, and networking decision has measurable implications for latency, throughput, and cost. The default choice is rarely the optimal one.
- Storage performance hinges on understanding I/O patterns: random vs. sequential, IOPS vs. throughput, and access frequency. EBS volume types, S3 storage classes, and shared file systems each target different patterns.
- Compute elasticity depends on matching scaling mechanisms (EC2 placement groups, container orchestration, Lambda concurrency) to workload shape: steady-state, bursty, or event-driven.
- Network performance is governed by edge caching, protocol selection, and data path optimization. CloudFront, Global Accelerator, and VPC design choices directly affect end-user latency.
Assumptions
- All concepts reference the AWS global commercial Regions unless stated otherwise. Some features have limited regional availability.
- Pricing figures are omitted intentionally; pricing changes frequently and is not tested on the exam. Focus is on architectural behavior and performance characteristics.
- Terms defined in Chapter 1 (IAM, VPC, Subnets, Security Groups, KMS, etc.) and Chapter 2 (ALB, NLB, Auto Scaling, Lambda, CloudFront, ElastiCache, DAX, DynamoDB, Aurora, Kinesis, ECS, Fargate, EKS, etc.) are used without re-introduction unless the context is new.