- Core AWS managed database services and their use cases
- Amazon RDS fundamentals, Aurora internals, and RDS Proxy for connection management
- Amazon DynamoDB design patterns, capacity modes, and pricing considerations
- DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for ultra-low-latency reads
- Caching and in-memory databases: Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
- Data warehousing and analytics with Amazon Redshift (including serverless)
- Graph databases with Amazon Neptune
- Time-series workloads with Amazon Timestream
- Search, analytics, and observability using OpenSearch
- Hands-on experience via browser-based AWS Cloud Labs
- Amazon RDS: managed relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server)
- Amazon Aurora and RDS Proxy: high-performance, compatible relational engine with connection pooling
- Amazon DynamoDB: fully managed NoSQL key-value and document store
- DAX: in-memory cache for DynamoDB to reduce read latency
- Amazon ElastiCache (Redis/Memcached) and Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
- Amazon Redshift: analytics, data warehousing (including serverless)
- Amazon Neptune: graph database for connected datasets
- Amazon Timestream: purpose-built time-series database for IoT and monitoring
- OpenSearch: search, log analytics, and observability
Deep dives and hands-on focus
- Amazon RDS: We’ll cover provisioning, high availability (Multi-AZ), read replicas, backup and restore strategies, and performance tuning basics.
- Amazon Aurora & RDS Proxy: Understand Aurora’s storage architecture, cluster endpoints, reader/writer separation, and how RDS Proxy reduces connection storms and improves pooling for serverless or microservices architectures.
- Amazon DynamoDB: Learn data modeling for single-table design, partition keys, secondary indexes, capacity modes (on-demand vs. provisioned), and cost trade-offs.
- DAX: When and how to add DAX for sub-millisecond read performance; trade-offs around consistency and cache invalidation.
- Caching (ElastiCache & MemoryDB): Compare Redis vs. Memcached patterns, clustering, persistence options, and how MemoryDB adds durability to in-memory workloads.
- Redshift: Query performance, distribution styles, sort keys, concurrency scaling, and using Redshift Serverless for ad-hoc analytics.
- Neptune

- Timestream and OpenSearch

This course emphasizes hands-on learning through AWS Cloud Labs. Cloud Labs provide short-lived, browser-based access to AWS infrastructure so you can complete exercises safely and without managing your own cloud account. They let you practice provisioning, configuring, and experimenting with services while following the lesson material step-by-step.
Hands-on labs simulate real environments. If you run your own AWS account outside of the lab environment, monitor resource usage and cost—especially for long-running RDS instances, Redshift clusters, and large ElastiCache nodes.
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