[NEW] AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner 2026

Learn the basics of cloud computing, its on-demand, pay-as-you-go IT resources, and how AWS cloud storage delivers scalable, secure storage across multiple locations.

Discover how cloud computing drives a revolution by enabling on-demand provisioning of servers, scalable resizing via the GUI, and the shift from on-premise data centers to cloud providers.

Explore three cloud computing models: software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service, and their practical examples and deployment implications.

Master cloud computing characteristics by exploring on-demand and self-service provisioning, elasticity for automatic scaling, and measured service pricing, including per-second vs. per-hour billing with examples from AWS and DigitalOcean.

Understand Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud platform, and its Gartner Quadrant positioning. Learn about AWS regions, pay-as-you-go pricing, and core services like compute, storage, and machine learning.

Learn how AWS global infrastructure uses regions and availability zones to achieve high availability and fault tolerance, with independent, geographically separated data centers connected by high-speed private links.

Explore the AWS account signup process, compare free and paid plans with $200 credits, and learn essential steps from email setup to payment verification.

Follow a hands on walkthrough of creating a new AWS account, including verifying email, setting root credentials, choosing a plan, entering contact and billing details, and activation.

Learn how to sign in to an existing AWS account using the root user email, verify with a code, and enable MFA with authenticator apps for secure access.

Enable multi-factor authentication on AWS to protect root credentials and prevent unauthorized server deployment. Use authenticator apps, hardware tokens, or passkeys to secure login and payment details.

Set up multi-factor authentication for the AWS root user via security credentials. Choose authenticator app, passkey, or hardware totp token, then scan the QR code and test sign-in.

Explore password-based versus key-based authentication for Linux servers, learn how public and private keys enable secure SSH login, and why enterprises favor key-based access.

Learn to create an RSA key pair in AWS EC2, download the private .pem file, and use it for key-based authentication to Linux servers.

Launch your first AWS EC2 instance by selecting CPU, memory, storage, OS, and security settings, using Amazon Linux 2023, t2.micro free tier, and a key pair.

Explore connectivity options for servers by logging into instances via remote desktop, SSH, or browser-based SSH, with Windows and Linux examples on AWS and other environments.

Learn how to connect to an AWS EC2 instance using browser-based SSH, compare browser-based SSH with traditional SSH clients, and run basic commands like ls in the browser session.

Learn to connect to an EC2 server using SSH from macOS or Windows, logging in as root at 134.122.89.191 and enabling SSH on Windows via optional features or MobaXterm.

Learn to connect to an AWS EC2 instance via SSH using a private key, set permissions, and log in as ec2-user, with browser-based alternatives if needed.

Launch your first website on an EC2 instance by installing nginx, starting the service, and opening port 80 through the firewall.

Learn how EC2 pricing uses per-second billing for Linux and Windows across regions, and how stopped instances incur storage costs while compute is idle; stop during weekends to save.

Terminate your EC2 instance to permanently delete it and stop accumulating charges; unlike stopping, termination removes the instance and its storage, and you cannot restart it, ensuring no future costs.

Learn the basics of ports and how firewalls regulate access to server services. See how AWS security groups act as virtual firewalls for EC2 inbound and outbound traffic.

Learn how to create an AWS security group from scratch, configure inbound and outbound rules (ssh, icmp, 0.0.0.0/0), and attach it to an EC2 instance.

Explore Amazon machine images (ami) and how they determine the operating system for ec2 instances, with options like ubuntu and windows. Also learn about hardened and custom amis, regions, sharing.

Create a security hardened Amazon machine image (AMI) from a secured base EC2, configure a user and file, then launch instances from the AMI and deregister when finished.

discover how to manage costs with AWS budgets by setting a custom budget, tracking actual and forecasted expenses, and receiving email alerts to prune unused resources.

Set up an AWS budget from the billing dashboard, use monthly cost templates, and receive email alerts at 85%, 100%, and forecasted spend to prevent overages.

Explore how a virtual private cloud organizes AWS resources using VPC, subnets, and route tables to control internet access and inter-subnet communication, with practical deployment examples.

Understand how an internet gateway connects a VPC to the internet, enabling inbound and outbound traffic for EC2 instances in both default and custom VPC contexts.

Learn how VPC peering enables private communication between VPCs across regions, with CIDR considerations, multiple peering connections, and limitations like no transit VPC and not overlapping CIDR blocks.

Explain the architecture of public and private subnets in AWS, including internet gateway connections, internal private IP communication, and use cases for public websites and private databases.

Explore how NAT gateway enables private EC2 instances to access the internet for updates while blocking inbound connections, shown via a public and private EC2 demo with an internet gateway.

Discover how network ACLs act as a subnet-level firewall in a VPC, filtering inbound and outbound traffic across subnets and helping block a specific attacker IP with deny rules.

Discover how elastic load balancers distribute traffic across multiple servers, prevent single points of failure, and provide a managed, highly available AWS solution with health checks.

Explore classic load balancers, the original elastic load balancing option, and learn to configure an nginx backend with health checks and the load balancer dns name.

Discover how AWS tags organize resources by attaching key-value labels to EC2 instances and other services, enabling easy identification, environment tagging (ENV: development, production), and cost center tracking.

Learn how to assign and manage tags on AWS resources, especially EC2 instances, including key-value pairs, optional values, multiple tags, and case-sensitive name tag.

Understand how AWS resource groups use tagging to collect resources like EC2 instances, EBS volumes, S3 buckets, Elastic IPs, and network interfaces for teams dev, enabling views and automation.

Learn how AWS CloudWatch monitors servers and applications by collecting metrics and logs across EC2, RDS, and other services, with CPU utilization alarms and CloudWatch Logs Insights.

Understand how AWS SNS uses a publisher, topic, and subscribers model to deliver messages to endpoints like email, SMS, HTTP, HTTPS, and Lambda through topic creation and subscriptions.

Learn the basics of aws lambda, a serverless compute service that runs code without provisioning servers, and explore runtime options, function url, and configuration for scalable, secure deployments.

Automate infrastructure management with infrastructure as code to deploy repeatable environments across development, staging, and production using CloudFormation, Terraform, and GitHub version control.

Explore how AWS CloudFormation enables infrastructure as code with templates, stacks, and resource dependencies, creating security groups and EC2 instances, and compare it to Terraform.

Discover how AWS Elastic Beanstalk simplifies deploying a production hello world app by automatically provisioning infrastructure, enabling auto scaling and load balancing, with presets for single-instance or highly available environments.

Learn to set up and deploy an Elastic Beanstalk web app by creating an application, configuring a Docker environment, roles, and instance settings, then test and delete the environment.

Learn how AWS Batch enables cloud batch processing with ECS-backed compute environments, job definitions, and queues to run containerized jobs and monitor output in CloudWatch.

Launch templates store EC2 launch parameters to predefine settings like AMI ID, instance type, security groups, key pair, and advanced options, enabling consistent, versioned deployments and governed usage.

Create and manage an AWS launch template to configure and launch EC2 instances, including AMI, instance type, key pair, security groups, subnet, and advanced options, then version control.

Learn how auto scaling automatically adjusts resources to meet demand, scaling up on traffic spikes and scaling down afterward using CPU utilization and scheduled or AI-based strategies.

Learn how AWS EC2 Auto Scaling uses dynamic scaling policies based on CPU utilization to automatically add or remove instances, with manual, scheduled, and predictive scaling options.

Explore Amazon Comprehend, a natural language processing service that analyzes call-center text for sentiment, language, PII, and entities, with demonstrations of medical data extraction via Comprehend Medical.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation within AWS, demonstrated with English to Hindi and real-time chat use with Twitch.

Explore Amazon Textract, a machine-learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents, including forms and tables, with an interactive demo uploading handwriting.

Explore Amazon Lex, a fully managed AI service for building conversational interfaces using natural language models, enabling appointment booking chatbots and Lambda integrations for varied use cases.

Explore Amazon Transcribe, an automatic speech recognition service that converts audio to text, supports real-time transcription and subtitles, and provides PII redaction and call analytics insights.

Explore Amazon Kendra, a search service that queries structured and unstructured data with natural language processing to deliver instant, relevant results from sources like S3, Confluence, OneDrive, Slack, and more.

Explore Amazon Rekognition, a deep learning based visual analysis service that enables object, scene, face, celebrity recognition, text extraction, and face comparison in apps via SDK or CLI.

Amazon Polly converts text into lifelike speech, enabling voice-enabled apps and use cases like contact centers and WordPress audio, with English and Hindi voices, and supports podcasts.

Explore how the domain name system maps names to IP addresses, how DNS servers resolve domain names via request and response, and why DNS underpins internet speed and security.

Explore how DNS queries and responses travel from client tools like nslookup and dig to DNS servers, and how Wireshark captures standard queries and responses.

Understand how DNS records map domains to IP addresses and how DNS servers store these mappings, with examples like kplabs.in. Explore record types such as A, CNAME, MX.

Explore how Route 53 provides a highly available, scalable managed dns service, contrasting it with unmanaged Bind on ec2, and learn through a practical nslookup demo for kplabs.internal.

Discover how content delivery networks act as intelligent proxies, caching popular objects and shielding websites with DDoS protection and a web application firewall to speed delivery globally.

Explore how Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network, uses diverse origins such as S3 buckets and API Gateway, with edge locations caching content for global delivery.

Configure an S3-based origin for Amazon CloudFront, create and deploy a distribution, use the distribution domain to access S3 objects, and explore edge locations and price class options.

Amazon WorkSpaces provides a managed, secure cloud desktop service accessible from multiple devices, including Windows, Mac, iPad, and Chromebook, using a directory service and registration codes.

Explore disaster recovery techniques for AWS architectures, including backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site, with RTO and RPO considerations, cost, and testing.

Improve application performance for global users by routing traffic through the AWS global network to the nearest healthy endpoint, with health checks and support for ALB, NLB, EC2, and EIP.

Explore the basics of virtual private networks, including how a middle server proxies requests, hides the client IP, and encrypts traffic for personal and corporate use.

Discover how AWS Client VPN offers a fully managed, pay-as-you-go remote access to internal servers, contrasting it with EC2-based OpenVPN deployments and highlighting cost and performance considerations.

Discover how a transit gateway acts as a central hub to connect multiple VPCs and on-premise networks, simplifying cross-VPC communication and routing.

Discover how local zones extend AWS regions to bring EC2 capacity closer to users, reduce latency, and selectively support core services with limited instance types.

Explore how VPC endpoints enable private communication from EC2 to AWS services like S3, without internet, using gateway, interface, or gateway load balancer endpoints.

Explore elastic block store (EBS) as a scalable, high-performance block storage for EC2, learn to attach and detach volumes, manage availability zones, and maintain data when instances terminate.

Discover instance store volumes and their ultra fast temporary storage, low latency, and high iops, their host attached nature, data volatility on stop/start, and backup tips.

Explore S3 as a durable cloud storage service with durability and availability, using buckets and objects, globally unique bucket names, and regional data placement; practice uploading files and organizing folders.

Learn the basics of S3 storage classes and how pricing and durability drive choices among standard, standard-infrequent access, and glacier for archiving.

Learn how AWS S3 intelligent tiering automatically moves data between frequent and infrequent access tiers based on 30 days of no access, optimizing costs.

Explore the One Zone IA storage class for S3, storing data in a single availability zone to cut costs by about 20% compared with standard infrequent access.

Explore AWS S3 Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive as low-cost storage for data archiving and online backup, with retrieval options from minutes to hours and cost-based choices for accessibility.

Explore how AWS S3 static website hosting publishes a static site by uploading HTML, CSS, and client-side JavaScript to a publicly accessible bucket with hosting enabled.

Learn how to host a static website on S3 by preparing a publicly accessible bucket, enabling static website hosting, uploading index.html, and applying a GetObject bucket policy.

Learn how S3 lifecycle policies automatically transition data between storage classes—Standard, Standard-IA, and Glacier—and expire or delete objects based on age using the management tab lifecycle rules.

Enable S3 bucket versioning to preserve and recover every object version, preventing data loss from overwrites or deletions using version IDs and deletion markers.

Learn how S3 transfer acceleration speeds global uploads to a centralized S3 bucket by routing data through CloudFront edge locations for faster uploads and downloads.

Analyze S3 storage class analytics to study usage patterns, tune lifecycle policies, and move older, infrequently accessed data to standard infrequent access to cut costs; export CSV reports for visualization.

Explore Amazon SQS basics through a simple image workflow where a reliable queue decouples the image gatherer and enhancer, enabling a loosely coupled architecture.

Learn how to create an SQS standard queue, configure message retention and size, and send, poll, and delete messages to understand producer–consumer flow in a practical hands-on session.

Explore how the AWS storage gateway lets on-prem apps use S3 via standard protocols, without modifying code, and learn the three gateway types: file, volume, and tape.

Explore centralized log management with CloudWatch Logs, which monitors, stores, and analyzes logs from EC2 and other sources using log groups and streams, with alarms and filters for scalable insights.

Explore Elastic File System, a scalable, fully managed AWS storage that auto scales from gigabytes to petabytes and serves as shared storage across multiple EC2 instances.

Explore how Amazon Kinesis enables collecting, processing, and analyzing real-time streaming data from producers to consumers, with stream stores, Kinesis agent, and Kinesis Data Analytics for timely insights.

Learn how the AWS Snowball family speeds offline data transfer with edge computing, from Snowcone to Snowmobile, and compare storage, vCPUs, memory, GPU options, and OpsHub.

Learn how AWS Backup centralizes backup policies across services like DynamoDB, EC2, and EFS, automates scheduled backups, and manages retention, cross region and cross account, plus on-premise support.

Amazon FSx provides a fully managed service that provisions Lustre, OpenZFS, Windows File Server, and NetApp ONTAP for diverse workloads, with secure encryption and S3 integration.

Learn the basics of databases, including flat-file and relational (SQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB), and compare self-managed versus RDS managed AWS solutions with replicas and high availability.

Explore how AWS RDS provides a managed, scalable relational database in the cloud, with AWS handling security, patching, backups, and recovery, and enabling read replicas and multi-AZ deployments.

Create a database in Amazon RDS using MySQL on the free tier, configuring the identifier, credentials, and storage, then disable public access and note the endpoint to connect.

Delete an RDS instance by selecting delete after acknowledging the warning checkbox, considering final snapshot and automated backups, to avoid unexpected AWS charges.

Learn how RDS read replicas offload read and analytics traffic from a primary database, using replication to keep data in sync across us-east-1 and ap-south-1 regions.

Discover how rds multi-az deployments boost availability by automatically failing over from a primary to a standby instance, handling primary az loss, network or storage failures, while preserving the endpoint.

Explore Amazon Aurora, a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible cloud relational database that blends enterprise performance, security, and reliability with open-source simplicity and auto-scaling storage.

Compare schema-based MySQL with NoSQL databases and explore schema-free data storage. See how NoSQL databases, including MongoDB, offer simple, flexible data models, horizontal scaling, and practical use alongside relational systems.

Discover how DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service from AWS, simplifies operations like provisioning, high availability, replication, and security while you create tables and items.

Discover how graph databases model nodes and relationships with Amazon Neptune. Learn why Neptune's fast, fully managed service excels for connected data and a visual diagram of query results.

Learn how the AWS database migration service (DMS) moves relational, NoSQL, and data warehouses from on-prem to cloud or cloud-to-cloud, using source and target endpoints, and a replication instance.

Explore AWS schema conversion with SCT, comparing it to the DMS schema conversion, and learn how to migrate schemas between engines like Oracle to PostgreSQL or SQL Server to MySQL.

Discover how ElastiCache, a fully managed AWS service, simplifies deploying, operating, and scaling in-memory caching. Compare Memcached and Redis, and learn how caching reduces database load via a point-and-click setup.

Learn how AWS CodeBuild automates compiling code, running tests, and producing ready-to-deploy binaries stored in S3, guided by a buildspec that defines the build commands.

Automate deploying the application binary from S3 to production servers with AWS CodeDeploy, enabling staged controls like BeforeInstall and ApplicationStart and options such as AllAtOnce, HalfAtATime, OneAtATime, and blue/green deployments.

Automate your release pipeline with AWS CodePipeline, coordinating source changes from GitHub, building with CodeBuild, and deploying with CodeDeploy to staging and production, with optional manual approval.

Discover how the AWS Service Catalog creates approved IT services catalogs to provision development and production environments, using CloudFormation or Terraform, reducing overprovisioning and costs.

Explore AppStream 2.0 to centrally manage and securely deliver Windows applications to any device via browser, enabling vendor demos, trials, and trainings without downloads or installations.

Explore why AWS Lightsail offers a simple, cost-effective virtual private server with predictable pricing, such as 1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 40 GB disk, 2 TB transfer at $5.

AWS SES enables sending and receiving email with your own domains, verify identities, and manage metrics, templates, and dedicated IPs for reliable email delivery.

Create and verify an SES identity (domain or email) to enable sending, then test email delivery from a verified address; learn sandbox limits and how to request production access.

Empower with Amazon EventBridge to route real-time events from sources to targets via configurable rules; connect sources like EC2 and SaaS apps to targets such as Lambda and SNS.

OpenSearch ingests, searches, and visualizes data from log files, matrix, and documents with dashboards like visitors by operating system; it forks Elasticsearch and can deploy in 15–20 minutes.

Discover how AWS Step Functions orchestrate serverless services like Lambda, SNS, and DynamoDB through visual workflows, using if-else choices, parallel tasks, and integrations to implement complex serverless patterns.

Configure a step function state machine to coordinate two Lambda functions (Terraform and AWS) using a code-based workflow, test executions with user course inputs.

Discover how the application discovery service aids migration planning by mapping on-premise network dependencies and recommending AWS EC2 instance types from CPU and memory usage, with agent-based and agentless options.

Learn how APIs enable secure access to backend resources through an intermediary layer, with authentication, caching, throttling, and a weather app use case using an OpenWeatherMap API key.

Learn how api gateway serves as the front door to backend services, providing secure, highly available apis with authentication, caching, and throttling at scale, plus a lambda demo.

Amazon Athena runs standard SQL on data in S3 to analyze log files such as CloudTrail. See demo counting operating systems and browsers and compare Athena to Splunk or ELK.

Compare Elastic Container Registry to a central app store like Google Play Store, and show how ECR stores private and public Docker images for integration with AWS services including EC2.

Explore the basics of container orchestration, learn how automation handles deployment, scaling, networking, load balancing, and fault tolerance, and compare Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and ECS for production workloads.

Compare ECS and EKS for container orchestration on AWS; EKS is open-source and more complex, while ECS offers simpler AWS integration. For multi-cloud deployments, use Kubernetes across platforms.

Explore the Elastic Container Service (ECS), a scalable container orchestrator that fetches images from ECR, deploys to EC2, and manages containers on a cluster.

Explore how Kubernetes orchestrates containers with a control plane and worker nodes, manages pods and scheduling, and enables features like auto scaling, service discovery, and automated rollouts.

Learn how AWS elastic Kubernetes service provides a managed Kubernetes cluster with tight integration to ECR and load balancing, plus worker nodes and pricing basics.

Discover how AWS Fargate replaces EC2-backed container hosting with a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine. Contrast traditional EC2 management with Fargate and show deploying a container to a Fargate service.

Explore AWS support plans from basic to enterprise on ramp, noting technical support, response times, trusted advisor checks, programmatic case management, and pricing.

Discover how the AWS managed service (AMS) lets the AWS team design, create, operate, and optimize your cloud infrastructure so you focus on innovation while AMS handles best practices.

Use the AWS pricing calculator to estimate costs for AWS use cases, including EC2 instances and data transfer. Compare quick and advanced estimates and pricing models to optimize monthly costs.

Explore the AWS well-architected framework and its five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, and cost optimization, and learn practices like infrastructure as code, recovery testing, and serverless design.

Explore how AWS Health detects and communicates service issues, distinguishing account-specific and public events, and automate responses with EventBridge, Lambda, and Slack notifications.

Explore the basics of EC2 pricing, including on-demand, reserved instances, savings plans, spot instances, and dedicated hosts, and learn cost-optimization strategies for efficient capacity planning.

Explore AWS whitepapers and documentation to understand well-architected pillars, security best practices, and EC2 tutorials, and learn how to use AWS support and community forums.

Explore how AWS Marketplace acts as a central catalog of software listings, enabling you to launch ready-made solutions like antivirus or Nginx Plus with pay-as-you-use pricing.

Explore how AWS Organizations centralizes management of multiple accounts via a management account, enables creating or inviting member accounts, applies service control policies and tag policies, and provides consolidated billing.

Explore and visualize your AWS costs with Cost Explorer, learn to analyze spend by region, linked account, and instance type, and generate detailed reports and CSV exports.

Explore how business intelligence blends data, technology, analytics, and human insight to drive outcomes, using ETL to normalize and integrate data from sources like AWS services and QuickSight dashboards.

Explore aws x-ray, a debugging and monitoring service for microservices that traces requests to identify root causes and performance issues, using the x-ray sdk, daemon, and api to visualize connectivity within aws.

Explore AWS License Manager to centrally govern licenses across AWS and on premise, enforce policy-based usage to prevent overprovisioning, with configurations for vcpu, cores, sockets, and instances.

Test the end-to-end aws license manager workflow by creating an ami from an ec2 instance, configuring a self-managed vcpu license, and associating it to the account to enforce limits.