Those are my personal notes on AWS Solution Architect certification preparation. Hope you find them usefull.

To pass AWS certification, you should have:

• Sound knowledge about most of the AWS services ( EC2, VPC, RDS, Cloudfront, S3, Route53 etc,)
• Hands on experience with AWS services.
• Good knowledge of disaster recovery, security and High availability architectures.

If you do not have prior hands-on experience and knowledge or you have little knowledge about AWS services, it is better to take an online course. If you already have experience in architecting solutions on AWS it is not necessary to take an online course.

I've had my mind on switching my development machine from a 13" MacBook Pro Retina to a Lenovo X1 Carbon running Linux for a while. The main reason is getting more familiar with Linux itself and also to have a more stable and minimal dev environment. So I finally got the machine and decided to install Debian 8.5 "jessie". Why Debian? Well, I tried installing Arch Linux once and couldn't get past getting wifi to work, and Ubuntu seemed like it added too much stuff. The choice was either Debian or Linux Mint. I went with Debian because it seems like it's the most stable.

I followed the instructions at https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/amd64/ch04s03.html.en which explicitly say to not use unetbootin which is a tool that makes bootable USBs for you.

1. Download the ISO image from the downloads page: `wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian