Cloud Pro: AWS Integration: Choose, Compare and Launch

What's inside

1. Level 1: Every AWS Integration Service on One PageFree
   Build a one-page map of AWS integration services grouped as queues, publish-subscribe, event routing, workflow and orchestration, API management and connectors, with each service's current and former names.
2. Level 2: The Standard Integration ProfileFree
   Describe any integration job with one repeatable profile: sync or async, commands or events, ordering, delivery guarantees and duplicates, message size and volume, latency, fan-out, long-running work, partners and SaaS, API consumers and security, team skills and cost model.
3. Level 3: Amazon SQS Standard Queues
   Run SQS Standard through the nine-part lesson: at-least-once delivery, best-effort ordering, visibility timeouts, long polling and dead-letter redrive, plus its dated limits, per-request pricing and a quick start you can launch and tear down.
4. Level 4: Amazon SQS FIFO Queues
   Learn when strict ordering and deduplication are worth FIFO's throughput limits, how message groups and deduplication IDs really behave, and what high-throughput mode changes.
5. Level 5: Amazon SNS Topics and Fan-Out
   Cover SNS in nine parts: standard and FIFO topics, subscription types, filter policies, delivery retries and dead letters, limits, per-publish and per-delivery pricing, and the SNS-to-SQS fan-out quick start.
6. Level 6: Amazon MQ for ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ
   See when a managed broker beats the native services, mostly for protocol compatibility (AMQP, MQTT, STOMP, JMS) during a lift-and-shift, and what you still operate yourself: broker sizing, maintenance windows and storage.
7. Level 7: EventBridge Event Buses and Rules
   Learn event routing with EventBridge buses: event structure, content-based rule patterns, the default, custom and partner buses, cross-account delivery, archive and replay, limits and per-event pricing.
8. Level 8: EventBridge Pipes: Point-to-Point Integration
   Use Pipes to connect a source such as SQS, DynamoDB Streams or Kinesis to a target, with filtering, enrichment and input transformation, and without writing glue Lambdas.
9. Level 9: EventBridge Scheduler
   Schedule one-time, rate and cron invocations at scale with EventBridge Scheduler, including time zones, flexible time windows, retries, dead letters and universal targets, and see why it replaces scheduled rules for most jobs.
10. Level 10: Step Functions Standard Workflows
    Orchestrate long-running, auditable, exactly-once workflows with Step Functions Standard: Amazon States Language, service integrations, the wait-for-callback pattern, error handling and per-state-transition pricing.
11. Level 11: Step Functions Express Workflows
    Learn when Express Workflows suit high-volume, short-duration processing better than Standard, and the trade-offs: at-least-once versus at-most-once semantics, the 5-minute cap, duration-and-memory pricing and log-only history.
12. Level 12: API Gateway REST APIs
    Cover the feature-rich REST API type: resources and methods, Lambda and direct AWS integrations, mapping templates, usage plans and API keys, request validation, caching, WAF, limits and per-request pricing.
13. Level 13: API Gateway HTTP APIs
    Learn when the leaner, cheaper HTTP API type is the right default, covering JWT authorizers, Lambda and HTTP proxy integrations, CORS, automatic deployments and the REST features it lacks.
14. Level 14: API Gateway WebSocket APIs
    Build real-time two-way communication with WebSocket APIs: connect, disconnect and custom routes, connection management through the @connections callback, idle and duration limits, and connection-minute pricing.
15. Level 15: AWS AppSync: GraphQL and Real-Time APIs
    Learn AppSync's managed GraphQL: schemas, resolvers in JavaScript, direct data sources, subscriptions, multiple auth modes, caching and Event APIs, with its limits, pricing and operational split.
16. Level 16: Amazon AppFlow: SaaS Data Connectors
    Use AppFlow to move data between SaaS applications (such as Salesforce or ServiceNow) and AWS without writing code, covering on-demand, scheduled and event-triggered flows, field mapping and per-flow-run pricing.
17. Level 17: Kinesis, MSK and the Lifecycle Check
    Place Kinesis Data Streams and MSK in brief against the integration services (covered in depth in the analytics course), then check AWS's dated service-availability notices for anything in this course that is retiring or in maintenance mode.
18. Level 18: Core Patterns: Queue, Topic and Event
    Name and compare the three basic messaging patterns (point-to-point queue, publish-subscribe topic and event notification versus event-carried state), and map each to the AWS services you now know.
19. Level 19: Idempotent Consumers and Dead Letters
    Handle the duplicates that at-least-once delivery guarantees and the poison messages that will arrive, using idempotency keys, conditional writes, partial batch failures, dead-letter queues and redrive.
20. Level 20: The Transactional Outbox Pattern
    Fix the dual-write problem (saving to the database and publishing an event that can fall out of step) with a transactional outbox, implemented using DynamoDB Streams or a relational outbox table feeding EventBridge Pipes.
21. Level 21: Workflow Versus Choreography
    Learn when to coordinate a multi-step business process from one central workflow (Step Functions) and when to let services react to each other's events (EventBridge or SNS), by building the same order saga both ways and comparing how each handles visibility, failure handling and change.
22. Level 22: API Design for Integration
    Design APIs that other teams and partners can build on reliably: resources and operations, errors, pagination, idempotency keys and the async request-reply pattern, mapped to API Gateway REST, HTTP and AppSync GraphQL.
23. Level 23: Securing APIs and Message Channels
    Secure every entry point in an integration: who can call the API, who can publish to or read from a queue, topic or bus, and how to keep secrets and payloads protected along the way.
24. Level 24: Versioning APIs and Event Contracts
    Change APIs and event schemas without breaking the people who depend on them, using stages, custom-domain path mappings, additive change rules, schema registries and deprecation windows.
25. Level 25: Tracing Across Services
    Follow one request through API Gateway, queues, topics, buses and workflows using correlation IDs, distributed tracing (X-Ray and OpenTelemetry) and structured logs, and learn where trace context gets lost.
26. Level 26: Metrics, Alarms and Dashboards
    Choose the few signals that show an integration is healthy, such as queue age, DLQ depth, failed invocations, workflow failures and API latency and errors, and turn them into alarms and a dashboard someone will actually use on call.
27. Level 27: Worked Cost: Two Real Integrations
    Cost two complete integrations end to end, a public order API with async fulfilment and a high-volume event fan-out, line by line from requests, messages, state transitions and data transfer, using dated example prices.
28. Level 28: Building the Weighted Selection Scorecard
    Turn the Level 2 integration profile into a weighted scorecard with criteria, weights, scoring rules and hard pass/fail limits, so choosing a service becomes a repeatable decision that others can review.
29. Level 29: Mapping AWS to Another Cloud
    Match each AWS integration service to its closest equivalent on another major cloud, and record where they really differ in semantics, limits and pricing model, not just in name.
30. Level 30: Scoring AWS Against Another Cloud
    Run the weighted scorecard for one integration on AWS and on another cloud, backed by dated evidence for limits, prices and features, and compare the platforms honestly, including lock-in, skills and portability.
31. Level 31: Final Challenge: Decision Workshop and Record Exam
    Bring the whole course together in a decision workshop: profile a realistic multi-part integration, choose services with the scorecard, design patterns, security, observability and cost, compare with another cloud, and write a one-page selection record you can defend.

Access

The first 2 levels are free with a free account. Every level, the podcast edition and the AI tutor come with All Access at £4.99/month or any Creator plan — see pricing.

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