AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials

Explore the fundamentals of identity and access management (IAM), including users, groups, roles, policies, and password policies, with emphasis on multifactor authentication, federation, and single sign-on for secure resource access.

Learn how policies define permitted actions and resources, attach them to users, groups, and roles, and grant appropriate permissions—including temporary access via IAM roles.

Explore creating multiple IAM users in the AWS console, enabling programmatic and console access, and attaching policies to grant permissions while protecting billing and the root account.

Create IAM groups, attach policies, and assign users to groups; establish a developers group with full access to code commit, code deploy, lambda, and elastic beanstalk, a read-only trainees group.

Create and attach IAM roles and policies to enable services to interact securely. Configure password policies and MFA using smartphone apps or hardware devices to enforce authentication and secure access.

Master Amazon EC2 basics and benefits, including secure, resizable compute capacity, elasticity with auto scaling, pay-as-you-go pricing, choice of instance types, security groups, and integration with AWS services.

Learn how Amazon EC2 purchasing options affect cost and capacity. Compare on-demand, reserved instances, spot instances, and dedicated hosts, with per-second and per-hour billing and contract implications.

Learn how to launch an Amazon EC2 instance using the management console: select region, choose an AMI and instance type, configure networking, pricing, security, and key pair for secure access.

Learn how to manage EC2 instances by stopping them to pause billing and terminating to permanently remove resources, including the delete on termination option for volumes.

Explore AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that runs code without managing servers, charging only for compute time with automatic scaling and event-driven triggers.

Learn how elastic load balancing automatically distributes traffic across targets such as instances and containers across multiple availability zones to achieve fault tolerance, health checks, and scalable performance.

Learn to create and configure a classic load balancer in AWS, selecting a VPC and subnets across two availability zones, and defining front-end and back-end listeners for high availability.

Configure a classic load balancer with a security group allowing http port 80 from anywhere and health checks that expect 200 OK on the default path.

Create a classic load balancer, tag it, and launch two identical instances in different availability zones with a shared user data script, then test health checks and dns-based routing.

Learn how auto scaling automatically adjusts compute capacity by increasing or decreasing instance counts to meet demand, using target tracking, health checks, and scheduled policies.

Launch an instance and create an AMI using a script, then use target tracking policies to dynamically scale your application in steps 1–3, preparing a launch configuration for future scaling.

Create a launch configuration for dynamic scaling with target-tracking policies, selecting an AMI, instance type, security groups, and key pair, while configuring VPC, subnets, and volume handling for auto scaling.

Create an auto scaling group using the launch configuration, set the design capacity and group size, and configure health checks, load balancer settings, and target tracking policy for dynamic scaling.

Configure a target tracking policy to dynamically scale your application by keeping CPU utilization around 70 percent and adjusting min and max group sizes with a warm-up period.

See how a target tracking policy dynamically scales your application by CPU utilization, adjusting the auto scaling group's capacity from two to five instances, with cleanup steps to avoid charges.

Discover Amazon S3 as durable, scalable object storage for websites, mobile apps, and sensors, featuring versioning, lifecycle rules, and cross-region replication for backups, archiving, and global data delivery.

Learn to create unique, lowercase bucket names with allowed dash or dot characters, then upload objects and manage public or private access in Amazon simple storage service.

Discover how Amazon Glacier provides a low-cost, secure archiving solution using vaults and archives for backups, with long retrieval times and API access for uploading and downloading.

Create and manage your own AWS virtual private cloud by defining IP ranges and subnets, configuring route tables, security groups, internet gateway, NAT, and connections to data centers.

Explore subnets in a VPC, dividing resources into public and private zones, enabling internet access via an internet gateway and elastic IPs, while keeping databases private behind a NAT.

Understand how a virtual private cloud extends your network to Amazon web services using a vpn tunnel between a vpc vpn gateway and a customer gateway, enabling a secure hybrid architecture.

Explore default VPC in AWS, where subnets have internet access and public IP addresses by default, versus non-default VPC requiring manual internet gateway, elastic IPs, and private IPs.

Describe how network access control lists act as a subnet firewall with inbound and outbound rules evaluated from the lowest number, and why custom NACLs must be applied to subnets.

Explore AWS VPC architectural templates to deploy varied networks, including public and private subnets, optional NAT, and encrypted VPN tunnels to a corporate data center.

Explore foundational concepts in routing policies, their relevance to business architecture, and practical implementation, including failover to location, followed by extensive hands-on lab sessions.

Explore how the DNS translates domain names to IP addresses, enabling global routing to AWS resources like instances, load balancers, S3, and CloudFront, with domain registration and health checks.

Explore DNS service options in the Route 53 console, including domain registration, hosted zones, and name servers. Learn to link domains and use health checks for DNS failover and availability.

Explore the six routing policies for responding to queries and define each policy. Learn how to apply them to record sets in hosted zones, with guidance on production use.

Explore how the simple routing policy forwards domain traffic to a single resource, using alias or A records to point to instances or a load balancer across Mumbai and California.

Configure a weighted routing policy in Route 53 to split traffic 50/50 between Mumbai and California load balancers via two alias record sets.

Explore latency routing in Route 53, directing traffic to the region with the lowest latency using latency routing policy for Mumbai and California.

Configure a Route 53 failover routing policy with health checks to route traffic from a primary load balancer in Mumbai to a secondary in California, enabling automatic failover.

Explore geolocation routing policy to route end-user traffic by geographical location, creating geo-based record sets for Asia and North America with respective load balancers, and distinguish it from latency-based routing.

Explore multivalue answer routing in AWS Route 53, returning multiple IP addresses to route traffic to healthy resources via health checks. It is not a substitute for a load balancer.

Explore DNS service concepts and domain registration with Route 53. Learn how health checks, DNS failover, and routing policies—weighted, latency-based, and geolocation—direct traffic to healthy resources.

Explore how Route 53 provides domain registration, DNS service, and health checks, using hosted zones and routing policies—simple, latency, geolocation, weighted, failover, and multivalue.

Learn how CloudWatch collects and tracks metrics for resources in real time, supports default and custom metrics and logs, and enables alarms and automated actions via API, CLI, or console.

Launch and monitor an EC2 instance with Amazon CloudWatch, compare standard and detailed monitoring, view CPU utilization metrics, and set alarms with SNS notifications to automatically stop underutilized instances.

Explore how AWS CloudTrail tracks every API call and management console activity to support compliance, auditing, and incident response across your AWS infrastructure.

Learn how to view event history in CloudTrail and create a trail to store all API calls and management events in an S3 bucket across regions.

Publishers send messages to an sns topic, then the topic forwards copies to all subscribers. Subscribers receive the same message via protocols, with topic permissions and management console setup.

Configure CloudWatch to monitor the healthy host count of two instances, publish alerts to an SNS topic, and notify subscribed email addresses when the count drops below two.

Discover Amazon RDS, a managed cloud database that automates provisioning, patching, backups, and scaling. Deploy secure, highly available databases with read replicas, multi-az failover, six engine options, and easy migration.

Launch a MySQL DB instance in your VPC with two subnets and security groups. Enable automated backups and monitoring for reliable operation.

DynamoDB is a fully managed no-sql service that delivers fast, single-digit millisecond latency at scale, offloads maintenance, and lets you create tables with partition and sort keys.

Explore how Amazon Redshift provides a fully managed, scalable data warehouse with automated backups, disaster recovery across regions, and massively parallel processing for fast queries and pay-as-you-go pricing.