AWS Certified Solutions Architect - anyone working in this area?

DoubleNNs

As far as Aurora - you have MariaDB, Percona Server, MySQL and Oracle Database. Each of the 5 are MySQL variants. There are plenty of reasons to pick one dtabase over the other, but some of them are political, some are technical, and some also depends on what type of support you desire when stuff hits the fan. And we're not even including other RDBS such as PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server, NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB and and CouchBase, other data warehousing options such as Big Query or Redshift, or other analytics tools such as Spark and Impala.

In regular bare-metal enterprises there are reasons to use NAS vs SAN vs SSD. Reasons to use RAID 0 vs RAID 1. In the practical world there are use cases for EFS (I actually ran into one just last week at work where I wished EFS was available in my region) and use cases for EBS. Sometimes the amount of technology choices can be overwhelming, especially when trying to decide what use cases a technology is good for and cases where it's bad. But the CSA is an IT architecture certification - those hard choices are the same choices more traditional architects still have to make when deciding what technology best fit their specific organization's needs.

Some orgs use AWS to host their websites, some use it simply for storage. Some use it for production workloads, others for quick prototyping only. Some individuals use it for labbing, some teams use it to build applications on top of.
Dropbox and Box both are essentially little more than pretty front-ends to AWS S3. Netflix moved completely to AWS out of necessity. CapitalOne is in the process of moving completely to AWS to give them an innovative edge over their competitors. How the platform is used will vary greatly amongst each organization using it, which is actually the reason why the AWS team is attempting to release as many features as they are - so that they can convince as many different companies that AWS is the right fit for them.

chickenlicken09

seems like the sys ops exam is the best one to start with.

techfiend

ACG mentions the SysOps exam is definitely the most difficult but it sounds the most interesting.

DoubleNNs

Stumbled upon a question today on Stack Overflow about the difference between EFS, EBS, and S3 and it reminded me of this thread.
Not sure if it's useful, but I think the answerer had a much better and more concise answer than I did:

amazon web services - AWS EFS vs EBS vs S3 (differences & when to use?) - Stack Overflow