Certifications
Certification
AWS 3-Tier Architecture Project Certification
Designed and deployed a complete 3-tier architecture using EC2, S3, Application Load Balancer, IAM, and security groups, focusing on scalability, availability, and best practices.
What I actually learned
The project started simple — deploy a web app across three tiers — but the details made it complex fast. Setting up the VPC correctly, making sure the private subnet couldn't be reached from the internet, getting the ALB health checks to pass, configuring security groups that were actually restrictive instead of just open... every piece had to be deliberate. The IAM work was particularly useful. Writing policies from scratch instead of slapping AdministratorAccess on everything forced me to think about what each component actually needed access to.
Topics covered
- VPC design with public and private subnets
- EC2 instances across multiple availability zones
- Application Load Balancer and Auto Scaling Groups
- RDS for the database tier with multi-AZ failover
- IAM roles and least-privilege access policies
- S3 for static asset storage with lifecycle rules
Why it matters to my work
The 3-tier model is one of those architectural patterns that shows up everywhere in real production systems. Understanding it at the infrastructure level — not just conceptually — means I can have meaningful conversations with backend teams, review infrastructure PRs with actual understanding, and catch security oversights before they reach production.
Skills from this certification
“Cloud architecture isn't intimidating once you've wired it up yourself. This project gave me the hands-on confidence to work with AWS infrastructure rather than just reading about it.”