Pokhara Engineering College

This was a taught course at Pokhara Engineering College covering AWS Solutions Architect Associate. Running it in Pokhara rather than asking students to travel is deliberate: the engineering intake outside Kathmandu is substantial, and the cloud skills gap it faces is the same one, only with fewer people on the ground to close it.

The syllabus works through the decisions an architect is actually paid to make. Compute, storage and database options are set against each other so the choice follows the workload rather than habit — when object storage is right and when a managed database is, when a relational engine earns its cost and when a key-value store does. Identity and access management is taught as the foundation a design rests on rather than a step added at the end, and networking covers VPC layout, subnets and the routes between them, because what a system can reach largely decides how secure it is.

Above that sits the part the examination weights most heavily: designing for availability and resilience. Spreading a workload across availability zones so a single failure is survivable, scaling horizontally behind a load balancer, deciding what may degrade under load and what must not — and doing it against a cost an organisation would actually approve, since an architecture nobody will pay for is not a solution.

Most of the room was spent in the console rather than in slides. Students worked in small groups, building and breaking the designs they had just argued about, which is the only way the trade-offs stop being abstract. The Solutions Architect Associate route matters for them because it is the AWS certification employers recognise first, and because it rewards judgement rather than recall — its questions are scenarios with several workable answers and one best one, which is closer to professional practice than most coursework gets.