AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional certification updates

What's new in the world of Amazon Web Services? Well, there are some changes coming for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional certification, Redshift launches new Serializable and Snapshot Isolation level support, and Resilience Hub gets a few new updates too. Let's get stuck in! 

Your keys to a better career

Get started with ACG today to transform your career with courses and real hands-on labs in AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and beyond..

Are you ready for the big news? The AWS Solutions Architect – Professional certification is getting an update. The cert is being updated to ensure it aligns with the Well-Architected Framework. You can take the exam at a testing center or online. You'll have 180 minutes to complete 75 questions, which include multiple choice and multiple response questions.

Here are some important dates to remember: 

• October 18, 2022: Registration opens for the new exam
• November 14, 2022: The last day you can take the current exam
• November 15, 2022: The first day you can take the updated exam 

Keep in mind that once you attain or re-certify for the Solutions Architect Pro, certs like the Solutions Architect Associate will automatically be renewed (assuming you already have it, that is).

Let’s talk about Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s data warehouse solution. It uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning. This solution now has two options to serialize transactions: Serializable and Snapshot Isolation. 

The Serializable option can be used to implement strict serializability, where a transaction could fail if the result can't be mapped to a serial order of the concurrent or overlapping running transactions. Snapshot Isolation will allow high concurrency where concurrent modifications to different rows in the same table would complete successfully.

Both options allow transactions to continue to operate on the latest committed version of the database. Serializable is the default option for provisioned clusters, and serverless data warehouses will use Snapshot Isolation as their default. This is available in AWS regions where Redshift is available. 

There are lots of new updates to AWS Resilience Hub. Resilience refers to the ability of your applications to maintain availability and recover from disruptions within a specific time and point (RTO and RPO).

Resilience Hub provides a central location to define, validate, and track the resilience of your applications to prevent any downtime caused by software, infrastructure, or operational disruptions. It also now supports Amazon's Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Route 53, Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS), AWS Backup, and can now use Terraform as a source to upload applications. This means even more applications will be protected from disruption.

The Resilience Hub resilience score has also been updated. The score will now be calculated to reflect a combination of operational recommendations and policy compliance. And if that wasn't enough, Resilience Hub now also runs daily assessments on new applications automatically. Manually activate this feature on any existing applications and deactivate it whenever you like. These updates are available in every region where Resilience Hub is available. 

Subscribe to A Cloud Guru on YouTube for weekly AWS news (plus news from those other cloud providers too). You can also like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or join the conversation on Discord!