Abdullah Şamil Güser

Introduction and Housekeeping

AWS ML Specialty Certification Exam Overview (Lesson 4)

Exam Purpose

• Validates the ability to build, train, tune, and deploy ML models using AWS.
• Translates business problems into ML solutions with justifications.
• Identifies appropriate AWS services for implementing solutions.
• Designs and implements scalable, cost-optimized, reliable, and secure ML solutions.

Candidate Profile

• 1-2 years of AWS experience developing ML solutions.
• Understanding of ML algorithms and hyperparameter optimization.
• Hands-on experience with ML frameworks like scikit-learn and TensorFlow.
• Knowledge of model training and deployment best practices.

Exam Guide Highlights

• Exam Resources: AWS provides an exam guide and sample questions.
• Question Format: Multiple choice and multiple response questions.
• Scoring: Range between 100 to 1000 with a minimum passing score of 750.
• Domains: Data Engineering, Exploratory Data Analysis, Modeling, Implementation and Operations.
• Section Level Feedback: Given post-exam to indicate performance in each domain.

Domains and Weights

• Data Engineering: Data repositories creation, data ingestion, and transformation.
• Exploratory Data Analysis: Cleaning and preparing data for modeling.
• Feature Engineering: Adding and creating relevant features.
• Modeling: Framing business problems as ML problems, selecting algorithms, training, and evaluating models.
• Implementation and Operations: Deploying solutions, ensuring availability, scaling, fault tolerance, security, and monitoring.

Preparation Tips

• Real Complexity: Actual exam complexity may be underrepresented by listed resources.
• AWS Knowledge: Approximately 15% of questions focus on general AWS knowledge.
• Machine Learning Concepts: About 50-60% of questions test ML concepts that are not AWS-specific.
• AWS ML Offerings: Around 25-35% of questions pertain to AWS-specific ML services and best practices.
• Sample Questions: AWS provides a sample question PDF to identify strengths and improvement areas.

Exam Format

• Duration: 170 minutes.
• Number of Questions: Approximately 65.
• Time Allocation: Roughly 2.5 minutes per question.

Conclusion

• The exam is focused on developing professionals capable of solving business problems with ML on the AWS cloud.
• It assesses not just AWS-specific knowledge but also a deeper understanding of machine learning concepts and their practical application.

References

• AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty (Look at the Exam Guide and Sample Questions!)

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Preparation (Lesson 6)

For AWS Beginners

• Course Requirement: No prior AWS experience needed.
• Follow Course: Complete all lectures and labs in sequence.

Starting Certification

• Recommended First Step: AWS Cloud Practitioner certification for AWS basics.

Cost Benefits

• Cost Savings: Cloud Practitioner exam can lead to discounts on the ML Specialty exam.

Machine Learning Knowledge

• Framework Proficiency: Get familiar with scikit-learn.
• Reference Book: “Introduction to Machine Learning with Python” by Andreas Müller.

AWS Resources

• Free Training: Utilize AWS’s “Machine Learning Basics” video and other free resources.

Practice Exams

• Course Practice Exam: Take the full-length timed exam included in the course.
• AWS Practice Exam: Available for purchase or free with a voucher.

Final Steps

• Exam Registration: Use any vouchers for discounts on the ML Specialty exam.
• Final Review: Address any gaps identified in practice exams.

AWS Account Setup, Free Tier Offers, Billing, Support (Lesson 7)

AWS Account Setup

• Sign up at aws.amazon.com.
• AWS provides hands-on experience with three types of free offers: always free, 12 months free, and trials.

Free Tier Offers

• 12 Months Free: Access to certain AWS services like EC2 (T2/T3 micro), 5GB S3 storage, and 750 hours/month of RDS.
• Free Trials: Short-term trials for services like Amazon SageMaker (2 months free).
• Always Free: Services like DynamoDB offer a perpetual free tier up to a certain limit.

Post-Free Tier

• Usage exceeding free tier limits or post-expiration incurs standard rates.

Root Account

• The initial account created is the root account, with the highest privileges.

Billing and Charges

• AWS automatically charges the payment method based on monthly usage.
• Use the billing dashboard for a consolidated view of charges.
• View detailed statements for an itemized list of charges.
• Contact AWS support for billing inquiries or to dispute charges.

AWS Support

• Billing Support: Available to all customers for billing-related queries.
• Technical Support: Requires enrollment in a paid plan. Free support is available for account and billing support.

Service Quotas

• AWS imposes service quotas (formerly service limits) to prevent unexpected charges.
• Default quotas can be increased upon request if you hit a service limit error.

Billing Alerts, Delegate Access (Lesson 8)

Enabling Billing Dashboard Access

• Billing dashboard is initially only accessible by the root account.
• To delegate access, activate IAM user and role access to billing information in account settings.

Setting Up Billing Alerts

• Navigate to Billing Preferences.
• Enable alerts for approaching free tier limits and for billing alerts.

Creating a Billing Alarm with CloudWatch

• Use CloudWatch in the North Virginia region to set up billing alarms.
• Create an alarm for when estimated charges exceed a set threshold (e.g., $5).

Email Notifications

• Set an action to email when the alarm triggers.
• Create a new topic in Simple Notification Service (SNS) and add email addresses for alerts.

Using AWS Budgets for Tracking

• AWS Budgets can track actual charges and forecast trends.
• Set a monthly budget and receive alerts at specified thresholds (e.g., 50% of the budget).

Instructions - Configure IAM Users, Setup CLI (Lesson 9)

Step 1: IAM User Setup

1. Root Login: Use root credentials to log in.
2. IAM Service: Locate IAM Service in the AWS console.
3. Account Alias:
   • Create an Account Alias for easier user sign-in.
   • Note down the IAM Users sign-in URL.
4. Root Account MFA: Set up Multi-Factor Authentication for the root account.

Step 2: Create my_admin User

1. User Creation:
   • Go to IAM Users.
   • Click Add Users.
   • User details:
     • Name: my_admin
     • Access type: Management Console
     • Password: Choose a custom password.
     • Uncheck “User must create a new password at next sign-in”.
2. Permissions:
   • Attach the AdministratorAccess policy directly.
3. Finalize:
   • Create the user.
   • Securely save the sign-in credentials.

Step 3: Sign-out of Root Account

• Log out from the root account.

Step 4: Sign-in as my_admin

• Use the previously saved sign-in URL and credentials to log in as my_admin.

Step 5: Setup prediction_only User Permissions

• Create Policy for SageMaker:
  • Navigate to IAM Policies.
  • Click Create policy.
  • Service: Choose SageMaker.
  • Permissions: Select “All read actions” under Read.
  • Resources: Select “All resources”.
  • Name the policy SageMakerInvokeEndpoint.

Step 6: Create ml_user_predict

1. User Creation:
   • In IAM, select Users then Add users.
   • User details:
     • Name: ml_user_predict.
2. Attach Policies:
   • Attach SageMakerInvokeEndpoint.
   • Attach AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess.

Step 7: Configure CLI for ml_user_predict

1. Access Keys:
   • In the ml_user_predict user details, go to the Security Credentials tab.
   • Create an access key under the Access keys section.
2. CLI Configuration:
   • Use the access key to configure the AWS CLI.
   • Follow video instructions [8:54 onwards] for CLI setup.
3. Download Credentials:
   • Download the .csv file containing the access key for the ml_user_predict.

Benefits of Cloud Computing (Lesson 12)

1. Cost Savings: Cloud offers a pay-as-you-go model, eliminating upfront capital investment.

2. Visibility and Control: AWS provides tools like AWS Bills, Budgets, Cost Explorer, Cost and Usage Reports, and Cost Allocation Tags for monitoring and managing costs.

3. Bulk Purchasing and Shared Infrastructure: Cloud providers negotiate better terms due to bulk purchases and shared customer infrastructure, reducing costs.

4. Capacity Flexibility: The cloud allows for scaling resources based on actual demand, avoiding over or under capacity.

5. Increased Speed and Agility: Resources can be spun up in minutes, fostering rapid experimentation and innovation at a lower cost.

6. Eliminate Data Center Operations: Outsourcing infrastructure management to the cloud saves money and allows businesses to focus on differentiating activities.

7. Global Reach: AWS’s global data center network enables businesses to deploy applications close to customers worldwide, quickly and efficiently.

AWS Global Infrastructure Overview (Lesson 13)

AWS Cloud Types

1. Public Cloud: Accessible at aws.amazon.com.
2. US Gov Cloud: For US entities meeting specific security and compliance standards.
3. China Cloud: Complies with China’s legal and regulatory requirements.

AWS Global Presence

• Regions: AWS has multiple isolated regions worldwide.
• Benefits:
  • Proximity to customers for faster response times.
  • Compliance with data locality laws in different countries.

Data Storage and Transfer

• Data stored in the selected AWS region.
• Customer-initiated data replication across regions is possible.

Availability Zones (AZs)

• Each region contains multiple AZs, each a collection of data centers.
• AZs are physically separate but interconnected for redundancy.
• Spreading applications across AZs enhances availability and protection.

Region and AZ Failures

• AWS design ensures regional outages don’t impact other regions.
• Example strategies:
  • S3 copies data across AZs.
  • Elastic Load Balancer distributes traffic among healthy web servers in different AZs.
  • RDS uses primary and standby servers in different AZs for databases.

Multi-Region Deployment

• Companies like Netflix deploy in multiple regions for higher availability.

Edge Locations

• Over 200 Edge locations support CloudFront for low-latency content delivery.

AWS Outpost

• Brings AWS services to on-premises data centers for low latency and critical use cases.

AWS Service Health Dashboard

• Provides global and personalized health status of AWS services and resources.

Best Practice

• Deploy applications across multiple AZs for enhanced reliability.