AWS Beginner to Intermediate: EC2, IAM, ELB, ASG, Route 53

Explore IAM in depth, from root account basics to creating users, groups, and policies, and secure access with MFA, CloudTrail logging, and programmatic options via console, CLI, SDKs, and API.

Explore IAM in greater detail, covering root account use, granular permissions, MFA, logging with CloudTrail, and access methods (console, CLI, SDKs, API) to securely control AWS resources.

Explore how IAM principles, authentication, request, authorization, action, and resources form the IAM workflow, guided by policies and JSON documents, with examples from EC2 and S3.

Learn core IAM concepts in AWS, including user names, credentials, ARN and ID, the root vs non-root distinction, and policies and authentication methods.

Master IAM user management by viewing user access, listing IAM users, deleting, renaming, and updating permissions for users such as John within the Admin Group.

Explore how to use the IAM access advisor to view last access and policy details for users, groups, roles, and policies, and safely delete or detach them when needed.

Deploy a hands-on guide to changing an IAM user's permissions by adding them to a policy-governed group, copying permissions, attaching custom policies, or setting permission boundaries.

Create a new group, attach administrator access and other policies (Axis Amplify, AWS Elastic Beanstalk), and add the IAM user to that group to grant permissions. Learn to move a user between groups, and remove them from groups if needed, while verifying their effective permissions.

Learn to copy permissions between IAM users by creating a new user, attaching policies from an existing user, and confirming admin group access, while securely handling access keys.

Attach a custom policy directly to an IAM user, using the visual editor or JSON to grant S3 access with specific resources and conditions.

Explore how iam groups assign permissions for multiple users, allow multi-group membership, and prohibit nesting, illustrated by administrators, developers, and test groups.

Perform hands-on administration of IAM groups by listing, renaming, and deleting groups, managing users within groups, and attaching policies, while preserving group users and IDs.

Create IAM groups and attach Amazon EC2 full access, AWS CodeBuild Developer Access, and Amazon ECS full access for developers and test groups; add Kelly, Kim, and Bill to groups.

Explore how AWS policies manage access rights by attaching identity-based and resource-based policies to users, groups, and resources, evaluated on each request and expressed as JSON documents.

Learn to create and apply inline policies to an IAM user in the AWS console, granting S3 list and read access to all resources, and compare inline with managed policies.

Create a custom inline IAM policy in JSON for a new user Sam, granting all S3 actions on all buckets from April 13, 2021 to June 6, 2021.

Create a new IAM user named Sam with programmatic and console access, then attach an inline JSON policy named custom.s3 for Sam to grant S3 full access.

Learn about IAM roles, an IAM identity linked to a policy that grants permissions, using temporary credentials when assumed by users or apps for cross-account access and EC2 workloads.

Create and configure IAM roles to grant an EC2 instance read and write access to S3, using a practical hands-on exercise that attaches policies and demonstrates trusted entities.

Examine IAM authentication for console and programmatic access, including MFA and AWS CLI. Emphasizes least privilege, unique users, secure credentials, and use of roles, groups, and temporary credentials.

rotate IAM access keys for any IAM user in your AWS account to strengthen security by reviewing key age and activity, deleting or deactivating old keys, and creating new ones.

Explore how AWS multi-factor authentication strengthens IAM and root account security by requiring knowledge, possession, or inheritance factors; implement with virtual MFA, YubiKey, and hardware fob devices.

Generate and download a credentials report for IAM users, then review MFA status, password and key rotation, and activity data in CSV or Excel for compliance.

Explore Amazon EC2, its virtualization-based compute resources, and scalable configurations using AMIs to deploy Linux or Windows servers on AWS.

Explore core AWS EC2 features, including scalable instances, AMIs, instance types, and persistent versus temporary storage. Learn about SSH access, key pairs, elastic IP, security groups, and auto scaling.

Explore EC2 instance types, including general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized, and accelerated computing, with a focus on t two micro instances and scalable options.

Learn about Amazon machine images (AMIs) for EC2, including EBS-backed and instance-store AMIs, snapshots, S3 templates, launch permissions, block device mappings, and marketplace, community, and my AMIs.

Create an IAM user named first EC2 with programmatic and AWS management console access, add it to the admin group, save access keys securely, and log in to administer EC2.

Navigate the Amazon EC2 dashboard to manage instances, images, Elastic Block Store, network and security. Launch a new instance and switch regions to review service health and availability zones.

Launch and configure a free-tier ec2 instance using the amazon linux 2 ami, automate a simple web page with apache via user data, set storage, and add tags.

Configure security groups to guard your EC2 instance, enable SSH and HTTP access, create a key pair, and launch the instance from pending to running.

Explore EC2 dashboard to view and name instances, review state, and understand public and private IPv4 addresses, DNS, http on port 80, and VPC details in us east (northern virginia).

Elastic IPs are reserved addresses you can associate or disassociate from EC2 instances, transfer between region instances, and delete when unassigned, enabling stable DNS and zero downtime.

Allocate an elastic IP and attach it to your existing EC2 instance to create a reserved public IP that remains when the instance state changes, accessible via HTTP.

Explore EC2 instance administration by stopping, starting, rebooting, and terminating instances, manage elastic IPs, and understand how IP persistence affects accessibility and billing.

Explore how to launch one or more EC2 instances from a launch template, predefining AMI, instance type, network settings, security groups, storage, and user data, with versioned templates for deployments.

Create an Amazon machine image (AMI) from an EC2 instance, configure its volumes and permissions, then launch a replica instance with correct security settings.

Learn to create and attach an IAM role for EC2 instances, granting S3 access through the Amazon S3 full access policy via the IAM roles console.

Learn how security groups act as virtual firewalls in AWS, controlling inbound and outbound traffic with rules, default settings, and the ability to authorize or revoke access.

Navigate the security groups console to view, edit, and apply inbound and outbound rules, create or delete groups, and implement SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS access in a default VPC.

Learn secure shell SSH for administering EC2 instances via command lines over the internet, compare Mac, Linux, Windows clients, EC2 instance connect limitations, and command execution and file transfer capabilities.

Install PuTTY on Windows, convert PEM to PPK with PuTTYgen, and connect to your EC2 instance as EC2-user using SSH.

Learn to ssh into an EC2 instance using the web-based EC2 Instance Connect client on Amazon Linux 2, verify ec2-user, connect in the browser, and run update and upgrade commands.

Explore AWS storage options—EBS volumes attached to EC2, EFS as a network file system, and S3/Glacier object storage—covering sharing, latency, cost, and cases like images, videos, pages, and archives.

Compare AWS storage options—S3 object storage, EBS block storage, and EFS file storage—and assess pricing, durability, availability, performance, accessibility, and use cases.

Explore Amazon EBS, the block-level, persistent storage for EC2, learn how volumes attach, encrypt, and persist; compare GP2, IO1, and HDD types and their performance and durability.

Launch and configure an Amazon EC2 instance with a gp2 EBS volume on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, managing IAM login, security groups, key pair, and multiple volumes.

Manage Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes on an instance, detach non-root volumes, and review volume details such as ID, size, type, IOPS, encryption, and availability zone.

Explore how EBS snapshots, stored as S3 objects, are incremental backups that save only changed blocks, create exact replicas, load data in the background, and enable cross-AZ or cross-region replication.

Gain hands-on experience with EBS snapshots by creating a demo snapshot and building a volume from it. Learn to delete and share snapshots publicly or privately with accounts.

Explore Amazon machine images (AMIs), create an AMI from an existing instance, and launch instances from AWS marketplace, community, or my AMIs.

Launch an EC2 instance in us-east-1, build an AMI with EBS snapshots of the root volume, and deploy more instances from the AMI. Validate with the httpd web page.

Create an AMI from an existing EC2 instance, then launch new instances from that AMI. Verify the AMI status, customize the HTML on the new instance, and terminate unused instances.

Discover how the AWS EC2 Image Builder creates secure, up-to-date VM and container images for AWS or on premises, automating build, test, patch, and deployment.

Create and configure an ec2 image pipeline using image recipes, infrastructure configuration, and distribution settings, including cloudwatch agent, corretto, and aws cli on amazon linux 2 emi.

Master building, testing, and deploying an AMI with the EC2 image builder pipeline. Verify instances, launch from the AMI, and clean up by deregistering the image and deleting resources.

Discover how Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provides scalable, shared Linux storage for many EC2 instances, unlike EBS, with pay-as-you-go pricing, high availability, durability, and four storage classes.

Deploy an Ubuntu 20.04 EC2 instance and create a new key pair. Configure a security group for HTTP and NFS, then connect via SSH and update the system.

Create an elastic file system in the AWS console, configure a VPC and standard storage, and mount the EFS to an EC2 instance using DNS and the NFS client.

Mount an elastic file system to an Ubuntu 20.04 EC2 instance, configure security groups across availability zones, install nfs-common, and mount and verify the EFS using the NFS client.

Upload files to a mounted EFS on EC2 using Cyberduck via sftp, after installing Cyberduck and configuring an SSH private key, and verify permissions to confirm the file appears.

Mount an existing elastic file system to a new EC2 instance during deployment. Learn to attach a shared EFS to two instances simultaneously and verify access to the mounted files.

Terminate unused EC2 instances, delete unneeded security groups excluding the default, remove the EFS file system, and refresh the console to complete the account cleanup.

Explore how AWS services enable automated traffic distribution with elastic load balancers and auto scaling groups, plus Route 53 for global DNS routing, and distinguish vertical and horizontal scalability.

Explore how AWS achieves high availability by redundantly storing data across multiple availability zones. Use elastic load balancing and auto scaling groups to enable elasticity and scale with demand.

Explore how elastic load balancers distribute traffic among healthy EC2 targets using listeners and target groups, with application load balancers handling HTTP traffic and health checks.

Explore how auto scaling groups manage EC2 instances to meet changing load, scale out and in, and maintain minimum and maximum healthy instances while registering with a load balancer.

Create an elastic load balancer and auto scaling group using a launch template and a custom AMI from Ubuntu 20.04 with Apache, enabling automatic deployment and traffic distribution.

Deploy an application load balancer to distribute HTTP traffic over port 80 between two EC2 instances, using a single public endpoint and a target group with health checks.

Create a launch template for an auto scaling group by selecting the ami, instance type, key pair, and security groups. Review the template details in the ec2 console.

Discover how autoscaling groups automatically deploy or terminate EC2 instances based on application load, integrated with the application load balancer and health checks.

Explore auto scaling strategies from manual to dynamic, including target tracking, step and simple scaling, predictive scaling, and scheduled scaling.

Explore dynamic step and simple scaling strategies using CloudWatch alarms to trigger auto scaling, configure step adjustments, and set cpu utilization thresholds in the AWS Management Console.

Explore AWS predictive scaling to forecast hourly load from historical data and scale the auto scaling group ahead of demand.

Learn to implement scheduled scaling in autoscaling groups by creating scheduled actions with set capacity, recurrence, and start times, including once or cron-based intervals, with a hands-on demo.

Explore the foundations of Amazon VPC, subnets, and Route 53 while learning how EC2 networking, public and private IPs, and DNS enable internet access.

Learn how DNS translates domain names to IP addresses and routes traffic to websites using Amazon Route 53, AWS's scalable, reliable domain name system.

Learn to register a domain with Amazon Route 53, create a hosted zone to route traffic to AWS resources, and perform health checks and domain administration using Route 53.

Navigate the domain dashboard and hosted zones in Route 53, review privacy, expiration, and name servers, and understand common DNS records like A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, and TXT.

Configure a hosted zone in Route 53 to route domain traffic to an ec2 instance with Apache, using an A record for the ip and a www cname.

Clean up your account by deleting the A record and the CNAME record, terminating the EC2 instance, deleting the load balancer, and removing volumes to avoid unnecessary charges.