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.

Explore how to create subnets within a vpc, assign them to specific availability zones, and manage network control with routing and security groups.

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.

Learn how AWS routes shape traffic by launching an EC2 in a public subnet, using a key pair and security group, and managing the route table and internet gateway.

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.

Explore AWS EC2 instance types, from general purpose and compute optimized to memory, GPU, and Mac on-demand instances, and see how CPU credits drive burst performance for T-series.

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.

Regain access to EC2 after losing a private key by creating a new key pair via user data, recovering with Systems Manager, or using the browser session manager.

recover the public key from your private key with ssh-keygen, then restore it on the EC2 instance by editing authorized_keys and log in via EC2 instance connect or SSH.

Learn how EC2 auto scaling automatically adjusts instances with an auto scaling group and launch template to meet minimum, desired, and maximum capacity, using spot instances for cost savings.

Learn how to create a custom network ACL and security group in a VPC, attach them to subnets, and configure inbound and outbound rules to control traffic.

Learn about the three AWS load balancer types: application, gateway, and network, and their use cases, including content-based routing, TLS offloading, and health checks.

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.

Amazon route 53 functions as a comprehensive dns service, resolving domain names to ip addresses, managing zones, and enabling health checks, traffic routing, and domain registration.

Explore aws outpost, extending cloud to on-premises via rack or server, linking your vpc to the nearest region for ec2, s3, and eks workloads.

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.

Compare instance store and elastic block store (EBS) in AWS. Instance store is temporary and tied to a VM; EBS offers persistent, detach-and-attach storage with snapshots.

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.

Learn how to create an EFS file system, configure VPC and mount targets, and mount it on EC2 instances using NFS v4, with security groups and DNS or IP mounting.

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 relational and non-relational databases in AWS, learn how tables relate data, and examine services like Aurora, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Neptune, and Timestream.

Explore AWS databases: Aurora delivers relational MySQL and PostgreSQL, faster and fully managed. Compare DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Neptune, ElastiCache, and Qldb for key-value, document, graph, in-memory, and ledger needs.

Launch an Amazon RDS instance in the AWS console, use standard create for SQL Server Express on the free tier, and configure security groups and EC2 connectivity.

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.

Explore the types of AWS sign-ins, including root user, IAM users with defined permissions, and IAM Identity Center or federated users authenticated by external identity providers.

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.

Learn how to assign an IAM role to a user so they can assume it to access resources like an S3 bucket, and switch roles to act with role permissions.

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.

Learn to implement operational excellence in AWS by using infrastructure as code for repeatable deployments, controlled changes, and RCA-driven improvements, while monitoring workloads and maintaining up-to-date SOPs.

Explore the AWS Well-Architected framework's performance pillar, learn to rightsize resources, choose appropriate compute and storage options (EC2, Lambda, ECS, S3, FSx), and monitor for cost efficiency.

Explore the sustainability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected framework by reducing environmental impact, optimizing resources, and using serverless and managed services like AWS Fargate to save energy.

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.