AWS for Beginners 2026: Cloud Fundamentals & Hands-On Labs

Identify the three cloud service models—SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS—and learn what each level handles. See real-world examples like YouTube, Gmail, and WordPress to compare responsibilities.

Learn how an internet gateway enables public subnets to access the internet via a route table. Discover why private subnets stay isolated in a VPC.

Learn how AWS route tables control traffic within a VPC, distinguishing main and custom tables, and how public and private subnets route to internet or VPN gateways.

Connect two isolated vpcs using a vpc peering connection to route private, non-transitive traffic between instances across accounts or regions, using non overlapping cidr blocks and updated routes.

Discover what EC2 is, a virtual machine in AWS's compute category, and how its components, such as AMI, elastic IP address, EBS, and ENI, enable provisioning of scalable instances.

Connect to your EC2 Linux VM via SSH as ec2-user using a private key with 0400 permissions, then verify public and private IPs and the attached elastic network interface.

Demonstrates connecting to an EC2 Windows VM via remote desktop, enabling port 3389 in the security group, decrypting the administrator password with the private key, and logging in with RDP.

Learn how Amazon CloudFront functions as a CDN, using edge locations and regional caches to deliver static and dynamic content from S3 or EC2 with latency and caching rules.

Learn to configure a CloudFront distribution for an S3 bucket, control access with bucket policies and origin access control, and optimize delivery with edge caching.

Understand AWS direct connect, a private, low-latency link from on-premises to the AWS cloud with bandwidth options. Compare it to site-to-site vpn over the public internet secured by IPsec.

Discover Amazon S3, a scalable object storage service in the AWS cloud. Learn about buckets, objects, uploading via console or APIs, object versioning, and 5 terabytes support and tiers.

Discover the eight S3 storage classes, from standard to glacier and deep archive, with use cases like backups and data lakes. See how intelligent-tiering moves data and how rehydration works.

Configure S3 data lifecycle rules with scope filters. Move current versions to Intelligent-tiering after 10 days, and non-current versions to standard IA after 30 days.

Explore the AWS snow family, including snow cone, snowball, and snowmobile, detailing their local compute and storage options and on-site data transfer use cases for remote or offline environments.

Host a static website on Amazon S3 by creating a bucket, enabling static web hosting, configuring public access and a bucket policy, uploading index.html, and testing the endpoint.

Explore how AWS CloudTrail logs user and API activity across services, stores events in S3, and enables Athena queries and SNS alerts.

Monitor AWS resources with CloudWatch by collecting metrics like CPU usage, memory, and disk, then visualize dashboards, collect logs, and configure alarms that trigger auto scaling or notifications.

Explore GuardDuty, a regional intelligent threat detection service that monitors CloudTrail, VPC flow logs, DNS logs, and more in near real time to produce actionable findings.

Create an IAM user in AWS using the IAM dashboard or Identity Center, assign to a group or attach policies, enable console access, and generate or share a password.

Learn that an IAM role is an AWS identity with no credentials that users or services assume to gain privileges by a policy; service linked roles let GuardDuty access S3.

Explore AWS well-architected security by enforcing least privilege with IAM roles, implementing security monitoring and logging with CloudTrail and GuardDuty, and applying zero-trust, encryption, and incident governance across all layers.

Inspect and optimize cloud costs by using reserved and spot instances, adopting a consumption model, right-sizing resources, automating shutdowns, and preferring serverless or managed services to reduce spending.

Identify single points of failure and implement zone and region redundancy. Scale with auto scaling groups, adopt a microservice architecture, and enable proactive monitoring and drills to recover quickly.

Explore the six AWS well-architected pillars—security, cost optimization, operational excellence, reliability, performance efficiency, and sustainability—and learn to design, monitor, and scale resilient cloud solutions.