AWS Basics: An Introduction to Amazon Web Services

An AWS account acts as a container for resources, enables region selection, and governs account-level billing; create separate accounts for production, non-prod, and test to isolate workloads.

Learn to create an AWS account and organization unit, apply policies to govern the organization and resources, and navigate billing, credits, and the free tier in the AWS console.

Explore how AWS organization centralizes accounts into an organization unit structure, enabling policy enforcement and central billing across production, non-prod, and test and development workloads.

Learn to create an AWS organization with a root and multiple organizational units, move accounts into production, non-prod, and test, and apply service control policies at root or unit levels.

Understand how AWS regions, geographic clusters of data centers, provide service availability, and how availability zones within a region enable high availability by spreading workloads for low latency.

Choose AWS regions by latency and proximity to users for fast access, and weigh cost, regulatory compliance and security, and SLA variations.

Learn how to choose AWS regions and availability zones to deploy workloads, create a VPC subnet in a specific zone, and place virtual machines in that subnet.

Understand AWS identity and access management (iam) to define users, permissions, and resources. Learn about groups, roles, and policies and apply least privilege across users and services.

Explore identity and access management in AWS by creating IAM users and groups, assigning read-only and custom permissions, and testing console access and policy effects.

Configure AWS with Azure Active Directory using SAML-based single sign-on via AWS IAM Identity Center, enabling automatic provisioning and seamless login with a single credential set.

Explore AWS virtual private cloud VPC to isolate workloads in a regional zone-aware private network, using default or custom VPCs with configurable IP addresses across availability zones.

Define a VPC's IPv4 address space with CIDR blocks like /24 or /25 to fit VM needs, use the two to the power n minus one formula to count addresses.

Learn how subnets partition a VPC’s IP range into production, non-production, and test networks to isolate traffic, using private and public subnet distinctions for controlled internet access.

Create a VPC and subnets in AWS VPC dashboard by choosing VPC only, naming it, setting the IPv4 CIDR block (10.125.0.0/16), and creating to view the VPC ID and status.

Create subnets within a VPC by selecting the VPC, define subnet ranges like 10.125.1.0/24 and 10.125.2.0/24, and let Amazon choose the best availability zone or leave no preference.

Explore Amazon EC2, the elastic compute cloud, providing secure, resizable compute capacity to deploy virtual machines, and learn about general purpose, compute optimized, and memory optimized instances.

Launch an EC2 instance by following the wizard: name the VM, choose Windows Server 2022 and T2 Medium, create a key pair, set VPC, subnet, public IP, and storage.

Explore Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provides block-level storage volumes for EC2, supports encryption and snapshots, and offers general purpose SSD, provisioned IOPs, throughput-optimized, and cold.

Learn to create and attach EBS volumes, resize and switch types (GP2, GP3, IO1/IO2), enable encryption, and create snapshots, then instantiate volumes from snapshots across availability zones.

Learn to take remote desktop access to an EC2 instance by decrypting the password with a private key and using RDP client, while noting the need for an internet gateway.

Identify and configure the five prerequisites: IP address, internet gateway, route table, security group, and network ACL—to enable remote access to an Amazon EC2 instance.

Learn how routing selects the best path in AWS networks using route tables to connect subnets, VPC, internet, and on premise.

Explore aws routing with the main route table and its local, intra-vpc traffic across subnets. Learn to create and attach custom route tables, and configure internet and on-prem routes.

Discover how an internet gateway connects a vpc to the internet, enabling outbound and inbound traffic through a 0.0.0.0/0 route and proper route tables.

Create and attach an internet gateway to a VPC, then update the custom route table with 0.0.0.0/0 to route internet traffic, and configure security groups to enable EC2 access.

Discover how AWS security group acts as a virtual firewall at the VM level, controlling inbound and outbound traffic with default and custom rules within a VPC.

Create and configure a security group in the vpc to control inbound and outbound traffic for ec2 instances, then bind it and update rules to allow internet access.

Explore AWS network ACLs as a subnet-level firewall with inbound and outbound rules, and see how traffic passes through the ACL before the security group to reach VMs.

Learn to manage network ACLs in AWS by editing inbound/outbound rules, blocking or allowing traffic, and creating and associating new ACLs with subnets.

VPC peering creates a networking connection between two VPCs to route traffic and enable cross-VPC communication for EC2 instances, even across regions.

Configure a VPC peering connection between two VPCs, update route tables and security group rules, accept the peering, and verify connectivity with ping while addressing firewall considerations.

Learn how a NAT gateway enables outbound connectivity from a private subnet to the internet via a public subnet and an internet gateway, while blocking inbound traffic.

Learn to set up a NAT gateway to enable outbound internet access from a private subnet by routing traffic through a public subnet and an elastic IP.

Learn how AWS KMS enables data encryption for disks, compare AWS managed keys with customer managed keys, and ensure encryption happens during disk creation.

Create a customer managed KMS key and use symmetric encryption to encrypt new EBS volumes, since existing volumes can't be encrypted on the fly; instead create encrypted volumes from snapshots.

Explore Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, a fully managed SMB share for Windows applications. Connect with Active Directory to apply NTFS permissions without managing servers.

Configure and deploy Amazon FSx for Windows File Server to host SMB shares for FSLogix or Citrix profiles, using VPC, security groups, and Active Directory.