AWS Business Essentials - The Business Value of AWS [2026]

Explore the fundamentals of cloud computing, compare consumer use with enterprise applications, and contrast legacy data centers with cloud models while highlighting scalability, elasticity, high availability, and fault tolerance.

Define cloud computing and its key attributes—on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service—using Gmail, Dropbox, Salesforce, and AWS as examples.

Compare cloud computing with traditional IT by contrasting data center costs, labor demands, and capital expenses against on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured usage.

Explore private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, and multicloud deployment models, with use cases, benefits, and how organizations balance control, security, and scalability across on premises and cloud environments.

Explore cloud computing service models, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and compare private clouds, infrastructure scope, and how responsibility and control shift from owner to provider.

Explore scalability and elasticity in the cloud, understanding how demand drives instances and scaling out or up, maintaining capacity and performance for compute and database services.

Explore high availability and fault tolerance for traditional it and cloud environments, ensuring automatic failover and built-in redundancy keep applications running with reliable uptime.

Discover how AWS leads cloud computing with the most services and global infrastructure, explore key capabilities, services, and pricing models, and see a first demo of the AWS management console.

Explore how Amazon Web Services enables on-demand, pay-as-you-go public cloud at scale to handle variable loads and seasonal spikes with 200-plus services across compute, machine learning, storage.

Discover how AWS global infrastructure enables worldwide deployment through regions and availability zones, with multiple data centers, fault isolation, and a high bandwidth, fully redundant network.

Explains AWS network topology with a focus on VPC isolation, private and public subnets, availability zones, and the internet gateway, plus public endpoints for DynamoDB, S3, Route 53, and CloudFront.

Understand the fundamentals of AWS pricing—compute, storage, and outbound data transfer—and how duration, data volume, pay-as-you-go, tiered pricing, and reserve capacity drive discounts.

Navigate the AWS management console to manage users, groups, and permissions with IAM, set password policies and multifactor authentication, and explore regions, global versus regional services, and VPC/EC2 basics.

Explore core AWS services across compute, storage, and database, including serverless options, machine learning, and analytics. Learn to build highly available, fault tolerant apps with Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation.

Explore Amazon EC2, the elastic compute cloud that runs virtual servers in a VPC with public or private subnets, offering on-demand, reserved, and spot pricing.

Explore the three AWS storage types: block, file, and object, and see how EBS, EFS, and S3 enable scalable, durable storage, sharing across instances, and automated lifecycle management.

Explore AWS database types, including DynamoDB (non-relational), RDS (relational), and Neptune (graph), and learn how RDS supports MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server with Multi-AZ standby and read replicas.

Explore serverless architectures with AWS Lambda, running code on triggers without managing infrastructure, paying only for execution time, and integrating with S3 for image resizing and thumbnails.

Explore AWS analytics and machine learning options, from Redshift and Elastic MapReduce to Textract, Transcribe, Translate, and recognition, plus a serverless workflow with S3, Lambda, and DynamoDB.

Learn to build highly available and fault-tolerant applications on AWS by using EC2 Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing to automatically recover failed instances and scale with demand.

Discover how automation with a platform as a service simplifies deploying apps using Elastic Beanstalk, auto-configuring resources like an auto scaling group, application load balancer, and a highly available database.

CloudFormation enables infrastructure as code to define and deploy AWS resources, including VPCs and serverless services, across regions, improving repeatability and reducing human error.

Explore cloud advantages through enterprise use cases, learn to build a cloud business case, and establish current and cloud migration costs while acknowledging agility and innovation.

Explore the six key benefits of cloud computing with AWS, including trading CapEx for OpEx, economies of scale, right-sizing capacity, faster deployment, lower data centers costs, and global reach.

Explore common enterprise cloud use cases, from email and cloud bursting to storage, backup, streaming data, serverless workflows, and audio/video streaming with CloudFront, with data egress cost considerations.

Identify business objectives and cloud options to justify cloud adoption. Analyze total cost of ownership and plan migration with the six Rs: rehost, replatform, repurchase, refactor, retire, retain.

Learn to estimate costs with the AWS pricing calculator by configuring EC2 and S3 estimates, choosing on-demand or reserved pricing, and selecting storage tiers.

Explore AWS migration tools for servers, data, and databases, and learn how Trusted Advisor helps align your cloud setup with AWS best practices.

Explore AWS migration tools for moving on-prem data to the cloud with server and database migration services, data sync, and Snowball options to EC2, RDS, Aurora, Redshift, or S3.

Discover the AWS Trusted Advisor's real-time guidance for provisioning by best practices, revealing cost savings, performance improvements, security and fault-tolerance enhancements, and reminders to adjust limits in the console.

Explore higher level managed services that reduce operational overhead, and understand AWS security features to build secure infrastructure while considering vendor lock-in.

Discover how high-level managed services such as Amazon RDS, S3, and Lambda offload infrastructure, automate backups, and enforce security, freeing your team to focus on value-added development.

Discover how the AWS shared responsibility model divides security in the cloud and protect data using encryption, IAM, Directory Service, GuardDuty, Inspector, Config, CloudTrail, Shield, WAF, KMS, and CloudHSM.

Explore how to avoid lock-in when moving out of AWS by balancing AWS benefits with portability across clouds using Terraform, Docker on ECS, and open standards like Amazon MQ.

Explore the business value of AWS by understanding cloud benefits and whether it fits your company. Learn about certification paths and how ratings guide decisions on your cloud journey.