Explore the AWS cloud's global infrastructure, from regions and availability zones to data centers and edge locations, and learn how latency, compliance, and pricing shape regional deployment for scalable applications.

Explore the latest AWS console user interface update, highlighting the shift to a brighter, more rounded design while preserving the same usability as the old UI.

Explore the AWS console, learn how to select regions for low latency, navigate services by category or search, and understand global versus regional services with Route 53 and EC2.

Discover how IAM creates users and groups, assigns JSON policies, and applies the least privilege principle to control AWS permissions.

Create IAM users and groups in AWS, assign administrator access, and sign in via a customized account alias to manage permissions safely without using the root account.

Explore AWS console multi-session support that lets you sign into multiple accounts within the same browser. Switch between account windows to perform quick EC2 and EBS tasks across identities.

Explore how IAM policies attach to groups and users, including inline policies, and understand policy structure with version, id, statement, sid, effect, principle, action, resource, and optional condition.

Explore identity and access management policies that control access by managing users and groups, applying admin and read-only permissions, and attaching or creating policies with json or a visual editor.

Define a password policy to deter brute force attacks and enable multi-factor authentication with virtual MFA devices or physical keys like YubiKey to protect AWS root and IAM users.

Configure the IAM password policy with minimum length, character requirements, expiration, and reuse rules, then set up root account MFA using an authenticator app and a QR code.

Explore AWS access options: management console, CLI, and SDK; generate and manage access keys securely, and use the CLI or SDK to access APIs from code.

Install the AWS CLI version 2 on Windows using the MSI installer, verify with aws --version, and upgrade by re-running the installer.

Install the AWS CLI version 2 on macOS using a graphical installer, then verify with aws --version in the terminal. Refer to the guide if issues arise.

Install AWS CLI version 2 on Linux by downloading the zip, unzipping it, and running the installer with sudo, then verify with aws --version and ensure Python and Botocore.

Learn to create and configure AWS access keys for the CLI, set up aws configure with a region like eu-west-1, and compare CLI and management console permissions.

Discover AWS CloudShell, a free in-cloud terminal for AWS CLI tasks. Learn to launch it, use region defaults, manage files, and upload or download data.

Learn how IAM roles grant AWS services permission to act on your behalf, letting EC2 instances, Lambda functions, and CloudFormation perform tasks.

Practice creating an IAM role for an EC2 instance, attach the IAM read-only access policy, and verify permissions before using the role in EC2.

Generate an IAM credentials report at account level to review user credentials status, and use IAM Access Advisor at the user level to identify unused permissions and enforce least privilege.

Generate a credentials report to audit root and user accounts, review password rotation, MFA status, and access keys, then use Access Advisor to refine granular IAM permissions.

Apply IAM best practices by avoiding root accounts, creating separate users, and enforcing group-based permissions and strong passwords. Enable multi-factor authentication, use roles for services, and never share access keys.

Understand the shared responsibility model: AWS handles infrastructure and security, while you manage IAM users, groups, roles, policies, MFA enforcement, key rotation, monitoring, and permissions analysis.

Map IAM users to physical users, group them, attach policies or JSON documents, create roles, enable MFA, manage with CLI or SDK, and audit with credentials report and access advisor.

Set up a budget and alerts in the AWS billing console, enable IAM access to billing, review bills by service, and configure email thresholds for a zero-spend or monthly budget.

Explore amazon ec2 basics as you rent virtual machines called ec2 instances, choose storage and networking options, configure security groups, and automate boot tasks with the ec2 user data script.

Launch your EC2 instance with Amazon Linux 2, configure a web server using user data, manage instance state, and understand http, https, public vs private IP, and security group rules.

Explore EC2 instance types, including general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, and storage optimized families, and understand naming like m5.2xlarge for class, generation, and size.

Discover how security groups act as firewalls around EC2 instances, controlling inbound and outbound traffic with port and ip address rules, including ssh, http, https, and rdp.

Understand AWS security groups by inspecting inbound and outbound rules, enabling ssh 22 and http 80 access, testing connectivity, and managing multiple groups attached to EC2 instances.

Learn to securely connect to Linux servers with ssh, using Mac/Linux via the ssh cli, Windows via Putty or Windows 10 ssh, and EC2 Instance Connect in a browser.

Access an ec2 instance from linux or mac using the ec2tutorial.pem file, set correct permissions, and connect via its public ip on port 22.

Learn to SSH into an EC2 instance from Windows using PuTTY and PuTTYgen, convert a PEM file to PPK, and configure key authentication for Amazon Linux 2.

Learn to use the ssh command on Windows 10 via PowerShell or command prompt to connect to an EC2 instance with your pem file, and troubleshoot permissions.

Learn how to use EC2 Instance Connect for browser-based SSH into your Amazon Linux 2 instance, with automatic temporary keys and no manual SSH key management.

Learn to securely provision EC2 instances with AWS credentials by attaching an IAM role (DemoRoleForEC2) with a read-only policy, avoiding aws configure, and validating access via the AWS CLI.

Explore EC2 instance purchasing options, including on-demand, reserved instances (standard and convertible), savings plans, spot, dedicated hosts, dedicated instances, and capacity reservations, with pricing guidance and workload use-case mapping.

Explain elastic block store (EBS) volumes as network drives that persist data after termination, detach to another instance, and bind to an availability zone with iops and delete on termination.

Manage and attach EBS volumes to an EC2 instance, including GP2 2 GB volumes in the correct availability zone. Understand delete on termination for root volumes and AZ binding.

Master how EBS snapshots back up volumes anytime, with cross-AZ and cross-region restore options. Use archive tier, recycle bin, and fast snapshot restore to balance cost and latency.

Explore creating and copying EBS snapshots across regions for disaster recovery, restoring volumes in different AZs from snapshots, and using the recycle bin with retention rules.

Discover how AMIs power EC2 instances by packaging your operating system, software, and monitoring tools into Amazon machine images for fast boot and cross-region deployment, including public and marketplace AMIs.

Practice creating and using an AMI by launching an Amazon Linux 2 EC2 instance, installing httpd, saving the state as a demo image, and launching from the AMI.

Use the EC2 instance store for high I/O performance with hardware-backed disks, acknowledging its ephemeral nature. Reserve for buffers or scratch data; back up, or use EBS for durable storage.

Explore Amazon EBS volume types—gp2, gp3, io1, io2, st1, and sc1—and how boot volumes use gp2/gp3/io1/io2. Understand how IOPS and throughput scale, including provisioned IOPS and multi-attach capabilities.

Multi-attach lets io1 or io2 EBS volumes attach to up to 16 EC2 instances in the same AZ with full read-write access, enabling high-availability clustered apps like Teradata.

Explore Amazon EFS, a managed NFS that scales automatically, supports multi-AZ mounting for EC2, and offers pay-per-use pricing, Linux compatibility, KMS encryption, and configurable throughput and storage classes.

Create and configure an Amazon EFS file system, compare regional and one-zone modes, enable backups and lifecycle tiers, and mount it on two EC2 instances across AZs to share files.

Compare EBS volumes and EFS file systems, noting EBS's single instance attachment except io1/io2 multi-attach and AZ locking versus EFS's shared, POSIX network storage with mount targets across AZs.

Clean up EBS and EFS resources by deleting file systems, volumes, and snapshots. Terminate EC2 instances and delete non-default security groups after ensuring dependencies are cleared.

Explore the differences between vertical scalability and horizontal scalability (elasticity) and how high availability uses multi-AZ deployments to survive outages, with AWS examples like EC2 and RDS multi-AZ.

Distribute traffic across multiple EC2 instances with an elastic load balancer, providing a single access point and health checks. Enforce SSL termination, stickiness, and high availability across zones.

Explore application load balancers (layer seven) that route http requests to multiple target groups for microservices, containers, and ecs tasks via path, host, and header routing.

Launch two EC2 instances, set up an application load balancer with a target group, and balance http traffic between them. Monitor health checks to route to healthy instances only.

Tighten network security by restricting EC2 access to the load balancer's security group and configure ALB listener rules, including a /error path with a 404 fixed response.

Discover the network load balancer, a layer 4 solution for tcp and udp traffic with ultra low latency, static ips per az, and health checks on tcp, http, or https.

Create and configure internet-facing network load balancer (nlb) with IPv4, attach a security group, define a TCP listener on port 80, set an HTTP health check, and verify healthy targets.

Deploy a gateway load balancer in your VPC to route traffic through a target group of EC2 instances for inspection, then forward to the application using Geneve on port 6081.

Enable sticky sessions to pin a client to a backend instance with a load balancer cookie. Learn about application-based and duration-based cookies, their names, and how to enable stickiness.

Explore cross zone load balancing across availability zones with ALB, NLB, gateway, and target groups. ALB is on by default; NLB and gateway balancers are off by default.

Learn how SSL/TLS certificates enable in-flight encryption between clients and load balancers, how certificate authorities, ACM, and SNI support multiple domains on ALB and NLB.

Enable ssl certificates on alb and nlb by configuring https listeners on port 443, forwarding to target groups, and importing certificates via acm or iam.

Learn how connection draining, or deregistration delay, lets in-flight requests finish while an EC2 instance deregisters, and set a 1–3600 second period to balance short and long requests.

Explore auto scaling groups to automatically adjust EC2 instances based on load with min, max, and desired capacities, and pair with a load balancer for health-checked scaling.

Create and configure an auto scaling group with a launch template, EC2 instances behind a target group and ALB. Set desired, min, and max capacity and health checks to scale.

Learn how to configure dynamic, target tracking, step, scheduled, and predictive scaling policies for auto scaling groups, optimize with CloudWatch metrics, cooldown, and a ready-to-use AMI for faster scaling.

Explore auto scaling groups with dynamic, predictive, and scheduled actions; learn how target tracking, simple, and step scaling maintain cpu utilization around a 40% target using CloudWatch alarms and metrics.

Use the Start Instance Refresh API to update an Auto Scaling group with a new launch template, replacing old EC2 instances while maintaining a minimum healthy percentage and warm-up time.

Discover AWS RDS, a managed relational database service supporting engines such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and Aurora, with automated backups, read replicas, multi-AZ, and storage auto scaling.

Scale reads with RDS read replicas using asynchronous replication for eventual consistency, and rely on Multi AZ for disaster recovery with synchronous replication and automatic failover.

Create and configure an Amazon RDS MySQL database instance in the free tier, set up security groups and public access, and learn backup, monitoring, and connection with Sqlelectron.

Explore Amazon Aurora, a cloud-optimized proprietary database compatible with PostgreSQL and MySQL, with six copies across three AZs, automatic storage growth, and instant failover via writer and reader endpoints.

Follow this hands-on to create an Amazon Aurora cluster, selecting MySQL compatibility, production settings, appropriate instance class, and replicas for high availability and read scaling, using writer and reader endpoints.

Encrypt data at rest on RDS and Aurora with KMS for master and replicas, enable TLS, authenticate via IAM or username/password, and use security groups and CloudWatch Logs.

Learn how Amazon RDS Proxy pools connections to RDS databases, reducing failover time up to 66% and improving efficiency, with IAM authentication and Secrets Manager, within a VPC.

Explore Amazon ElastiCache, a managed Redis or Memcached service that reduces database load by caching frequent queries and enables stateless apps through session data in the cache.

Learn to configure and deploy an ElastiCache Redis cache on AWS, using a node-based cluster, with security options, backups, maintenance, and failover readiness.

Explore ElastiCache caching strategies, including lazy loading (cache-aside) and write-through, with notes on cache hits and misses, TTL, eviction, and data structuring for RDS-backed apps.

Discover Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, a Redis-compatible, durable in memory database with Multi-AZ transaction logs, scalable from tens of gigabytes to hundreds of terabytes for web, mobile, gaming, streaming apps.

Discover how the domain name system translates hostnames to IP addresses, and explore registrars, DNS records, zone files, and the DNS lookup flow.

Explore amazon route 53 to manage dns records and register domains. Compare public and private hosted zones for A, quadruple A, CNAME, and NS records.

register a domain in route 53, choose a unique domain, enable auto renew and privacy protection, review and pay, then manage DNS records in the new hosted zone.

Create your first Route 53 records by adding an A record for test.stephanetheteacher.com to route IPv4 traffic, set TTL, and verify using nslookup or dig from CloudShell.

Launch three EC2 instances in Frankfurt, Northern Virginia, and Singapore, enable HTTP access, and deploy an application load balancer with Route 53 routing and bootstrap user data script.

Explore how ttl, or time to live, governs dns caching for Route 53 A records, comparing high and low ttl strategies and how changes update globally.

Explain the differences between CNAME and Route 53 alias records, including when to use root versus non-root domains and how alias targets AWS resources with built-in health checks.

Explore how the simple routing policy answers DNS queries by returning one or more A record IPs for a single resource, with clients selecting randomly and TTL guiding refresh.

Explore weighted routing with Amazon Route 53, assigning relative weights (for example 70, 20, 10) to distribute traffic, enable load balancing across regions, and shift traffic over time.

Learn how latency-based routing policies in Route 53 redirect users to the lowest-latency region, using health checks and region-aware records to route to ap-southeast-1, us-east-1, or eu-central-1.

Explains Route 53 health checks enabling automated DNS failover across multi-region public resources and private endpoints using endpoint, calculated, and CloudWatch alarm checks, with CloudWatch metrics.

Create Route 53 health checks for EC2 across US east 1, AP Southeast 1, and EU central 1 using IP endpoints on port 80 and root path.

Explore Route 53 failover routing by configuring a primary and secondary record with health checks. Test automatic failover from EU-central-1 to US-east-1 and back.

Learn geolocation routing in Route 53, routing users by continent, country, or state to region-specific IPs; use a default record, optional health checks, and test localization with real-world examples.

Explore geoproximity routing to shift traffic by bias based on user and resource locations, using latitude and longitude or AWS region resources, with Route 53 traffic flow.

Master IP-based routing in Route 53 by mapping CIDR blocks to endpoints, optimizing traffic and reducing costs with predefined IP ranges.

Explore Route 53 multi-value routing, which returns up to eight healthy records for client-side load balancing, filtered by health checks and tested with dig.

Distinguish domain registrar from the DNS service and explain you can use Route 53 as the DNS provider by creating a public hosted zone and updating the registrar's NS records.

Clean up route 53 to cut costs: delete hosted zone after emptying records and remove domain name; terminate ec2s in Frankfurt, us-east-1, ap-southeast-1 and delete alb with its target group.

Explore a high-level crash course on VPC concepts, including subnets, gateways, security groups, NACL, flow logs, peering, endpoints, site-to-site VPN, and Direct Connect.

Explore AWS VPC concepts, including regional VPCs with public and private subnets, route tables, internet gateways, and NAT gateways or NAT instances for secure internet access.

Compare and configure network ACLs and security groups to protect a VPC's subnet and EC2 instances, understanding their differences, stateful behavior, and logging with VPC flow logs.

Connect VPCs privately via VPC peering with non overlapping IP ranges, and use VPC endpoints for private access to AWS services; compare site-to-site VPN and direct connect for on-prem connectivity.

Recall that vpc stands for virtual private cloud, covering default vpc, subnets by availability zone, internet gateway, nat, nacls, security groups, peering, endpoints, flow logs, and vpn or Direct Connect.

Learn a three-tier architecture on AWS, with a public ELB, Route 53, private EC2 subnets for autoscaling, RDS with ElastiCache, and Wordpress on EC2 using EFS for shared images.