AWS in action : From Fundamentals to Expertise

Contrast traditional IT with cloud computing, noting data centers, servers, storage, and self-management vs. cloud deployment and service models that offer greater flexibility, accessibility, and more.

Explore cloud computing as internet-based services with pay-as-you-go storage, databases, and analytics; compare public, private, and hybrid clouds, with AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Compare traditional IT and cloud computing: traditional IT requires owning data centers, hardware, cooling, and upfront commitments, while cloud offers on-demand resources, pay-as-you-go, and agile experimentation with shared security responsibilities.

Explore the three cloud service models—SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS—and their responsibilities, from provider-managed hardware, networking, and data to shared control with customers, with examples like Gmail and EC2.

Explore how AWS Global Infrastructure delivers cloud services worldwide with over 200 services through regions, availability zones, edge locations, and regional edge cache. Leverage these components for scalable services.

Learn how regions and availability zones form AWS infrastructure: regions are geographic areas with multiple availability zones and data centers, with 34 regions and 108 availability zones as of 2024.

Explore edge locations to reduce latency by caching content on the AWS backbone network and delivering via CloudFront, a content delivery network, improving user experience for global customers.

Explore how regional edge cache sits between your origin and edge locations to reduce latency, and how local zones bring compute, networking, and storage near major cities.

Explore AWS outposts, a fully managed hybrid cloud that extends compute and storage to on-prem facilities, monitored from the AWS console. Understand endpoints and regional endpoints shaping pricing and latency.

Explore identity and access management (IAM) in AWS, including user access control, granular permissions at the bucket level, federation identity, multi-factor authentication, root user, and password rotation.

Master IAM terminology, including users, groups, policies, and roles. Create users, assemble groups, craft JSON policies for S3, EC2, and databases, and assign roles to groups for access.

Understand the root user in AWS, its full permissions and cost liability, and protect the root user with MFA while applying least-privilege practices by creating IAM users, roles, groups.

Create an IAM user in the AWS console, grant console access, and attach administrator policies. Assign the user to groups, set a password, and avoid using the root user.

In this demo, create an AWS account role with S3 full access, copy the role ARN, and assign the role to a demo user via an inline policy using sts:assumeRole.

Enable multi-factor authentication to add a verification step for AWS logins. Secure root and IAM users with options like a text message or token, and follow least privilege.

Set up multi-factor authentication for your AWS root account by adding MFA, choosing an authenticator app, scanning a QR code, and verifying codes to enhance security.

Learn Amazon S3, an object storage service with availability and security, and master key concepts—bucket, object, key, and region—through demos and use cases like backups, archival, and AI knowledge bases.

Create a new S3 bucket in a chosen region, select general purpose storage, configure encryption and access, then upload files and explore public access and pre-signed URLs.

Explore S3 buckets as region-scoped containers for files, learn global naming rules, and implement access control with IAM policies, bucket policies, and object-level ACLs.

Demonstrate unblocking public access on an S3 bucket and crafting a bucket policy with a policy generator to grant get object access to everyone using the bucket ARN.

Explore how S3 versioning preserves every object variant at the bucket level, protects against unintended deletes, and supports an audit trail, with version IDs, delete markers, and lifecycle policies.

Enable S3 versioning in a bucket to track file versions and version IDs. Learn to revert or restore using delete markers, with versioning only suspendable.

Describe data consistency in S3, including read-after-write and eventual consistency, and explain S3 replication, its prerequisites (versioning and IAM permissions), and cross-region and same-region replication use cases.

Create a source bucket with versioning and set up a replication rule to a destination bucket in another region. Replication covers new objects; existing files require a one-time batch copy.

Explore the S3 storage classes in depth, including standard, one zone IA, and glacier expedited, standard, and bulk tiers, with cost optimization and automatic tiering.

Explore creating an S3 bucket, uploading a file, and changing storage classes, including standard, standard IA, and how pricing, minimum durations, and retrieval fees influence choices.

Explore s3 lifecycle management and automatically transition objects between storage classes to save costs, using policies from standard to infrequent access to glacier, with intelligent-tiering guidance.

Learn to set up an S3 lifecycle rule for a bucket, applying transitions between storage classes such as standard, intelligent-tiering, one zone-ia, and glacier, and expire current versions.

Learn S3 encryption strategies for data in transit and at rest, including SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C, and client-side encryption, with key management, HTTPS requirements, and KMS quotas.

Track s3 bucket activity and optimize cost efficiency and data protection using s3 storage lens, with organization-wide visibility, interactive dashboards, and metrics across accounts, regions, storage classes, and tags.

Explore EC2, AWS's secure, resizable infrastructure as a service that creates virtual servers in minutes with EBS storage and auto scaling. It underpins cloud native apps and AI workloads.

Explore EC2 pricing models including on-demand, reserved instances, spot, and dedicated hosts, with guidance on when to use each for unpredictable spikes, steady workloads, flexible tasks, and regulatory compliance.

Learn to configure EC2 instances by selecting operating systems and instance types. Choose compute capacity, RAM, storage options (EBS, EFS, instance store), and private access with security groups.

Launch an EC2 instance in the AWS console, choosing Windows, AMI, and a t3 micro, then set up key pair, VPC, security groups, and RDP access with 0.0.0.0/0 caution.

Watch this demo to launch and verify an EC2 Windows instance, view its details and IP, connect via RDP by decrypting the password, and perform cleanup to avoid costs.

Learn how elastic block storage (EBS) provides root and additional volumes for EC2, including AZ constraints, snapshots for moving across AZs, and GP2/GP3 and Io1/Io2 types, with delete-on-termination rules.

Create and attach elastic block store volumes to an EC2 instance, choose the correct availability zone, and manage volumes with tags and snapshots.

Learn how terminating an EC2 instance deletes the root EBS volume and transitions volumes from in use to available, and how to manually delete extra volumes to avoid charges.

Explore elastic file system (EFS): mount a scalable network drive across multiple EC2 instances, across Linux and Mac, with bursting or provisioned throughput, and compare it to EBS.

Explore Amazon machine image creation and usage to launch EC2 instances from a pre-configured package, and differentiate instance store as ephemeral, temporary storage for buffer cache and scratch data.

Explore Amazon CloudWatch, a comprehensive monitoring service that collects metrics, displays dashboards, and triggers actions via Lambda and SNS, with logs from EC2, VPC, CloudTrail, and Lambda for analysis.

Explore AWS Lambda, a serverless function-as-a-service that runs your code in response to events, scales automatically, and charges only for the compute time you consume.

Explore a hands-on AWS Lambda demo, showing multi-language support, code execution, auto scaling, and low cost, with creating, testing, triggering, monitoring, and cleanup.

Explore how elastic load balancers distribute traffic across EC2 instances and availability zones, choose among classic, application, and network types, and leverage health checks, security, and monitoring with CloudWatch.

Launch two EC2 instances in different availability zones, deploy Apache web servers, and configure an application load balancer to distribute HTTP traffic via a target group and health checks.

Explore AWS's purpose-built databases, from relational options like RDS and Aurora to DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Neptune, and Timestream, and learn to choose the right service under the shared responsibility model.

Explore the relational database service on Amazon, with standard and Aurora offerings, supported engines, and a managed, secure, durable platform offering automatic failover and cross-account manual snapshots.

Compare GP2 general purpose and provisioned IOPs for RDS, scalable to 64 TB; GP2 fits development, QA, UAT, and testing, while provisioned IOPs fits production, with R5 or Graviton recommended.

Explore the architecture of RDS, including multi-az deployment with automatic failover and read replicas for scaling, all within a managed service.

Explore Amazon Aurora's architecture with separated compute and storage, two flavors (MySQL and PostgreSQL), six copies in three AZs, and up to 15 read replicas with automatic failover.

Explore Babelfish, an extension of Aurora PostgreSQL that understands T-SQL and supports both PostgreSQL and SQL Server queries, enabling seamless migration with dual port access.

learn to create an Aurora Postgres-compatible cluster in the AWS console, selecting engine 15.4 for dev and test, and configuring storage, connectivity, and security groups with monitoring options.

Discover how an Aurora cluster provides a single reader endpoint with automatic load balancing to multiple read replicas, plus writer endpoints, monitoring, backups, and the clone feature for testing production.

Learn how RDS parameter groups organize engine settings, create custom groups, attach them to instances, and distinguish dynamic versus static parameters and option groups like TDE.

Explore how to manage AWS RDS parameter groups by creating a custom parameter group, configuring engine-specific settings, and applying changes to a database instance in immediate or maintenance windows.

Explore RDS and Aurora backups with automated backups and manual snapshots stored in S3, encrypted when needed, with restores creating instances, and monitor with CloudWatch, enhanced monitoring, and performance insights.

Secure RDS with database, IAM, and network level controls using VPC, security groups, and private subnets, then use RDS proxy for scalable connections and DevOps guru for ML-driven issue detection.

Explore DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database on AWS, delivering fast single-digit millisecond performance at scale. Learn on-demand and auto-scaling, serverless operation, encryption with KMS, and multi-region global tables.

Explore DynamoDB features like on-demand backup and restore with point-in-time recovery, TTL, and DAX acceleration for 10x faster queries, ACID transactions within the region, and DynamoDB streams with Kinesis integration.

Explore how to design DynamoDB tables by defining a primary key, including partition key and composite primary key with sort key, and align with access patterns to optimize performance.

Learn how to create a DynamoDB table in the AWS console, set a partition key, optional sort key, choose default or custom settings, and add items with a flexible schema.

Create a DynamoDB table with a partition key and a sort key to form a composite primary key, then add items with the same employee ID but different projects.

Explore PartiQL editor to run SQL-like queries on the employee table, adjust provisioned capacity with auto scaling, and use the capacity calculator to compare on-demand vs provisioned DynamoDB pricing.

Explore DynamoDB indexes to boost query performance with global and local secondary indexes. Learn GSI has throughput and different keys; LSI shares table capacity and supports eventual and strong consistency.

Explore AWS migration tools and services, including the AWS Schema Conversion Tool and AWS Database Migration Service, with demos of Compass and Fleet Advisor; review six migration approaches for budgeting.

Explore database migration scenarios, including homogeneous migrations with the same engine on prem and in the cloud via native backup, and heterogeneous migrations to MySQL or Postgres via schema conversion.

Discover how the AWS Schema Conversion Tool aids migrating on-premises databases to AWS by producing assessment reports, converting code, and saving scripts, with desktop or DMS schema conversion options.

Discover how the DMS SC integration with generative AI improves schema conversion and follow an end-to-end setup: instance profile, data providers, migration project, and launching DMS.

Migrate a commercial SQL Server database to Babelfish by generating a compass report, adapting T-SQL for Babelfish, recreating the schema, migrating data with AWS DMS, validating, and reconfiguring the application.

Install the Babelfish compass tool by ensuring 64-bit Java JRE 8+, download from GitHub, unzip, and run 'Babelfish compass --help' in cmd to access options and reports.

Learn to download and install JRE 8, set the JRE path in system variables, reboot, then download and extract the Babelfish compass tool from GitHub, and test installation via cmd.

Generate the compass report with Babelfish, using the basic command and T-SQL DDL scripts from SSMs to create an HTML report, and use xref to view dependencies.

Describe the Babelfish compass tool for generating MySQL reports from DDL and T-SQL, using rewrite to auto-convert code, saving a rewrite folder, and managing reports with delete.

Demonstrates generating a Babelfish compass report from an unzipped directory, showing command syntax, output folders, and options including delete, xref, and rewrite to produce an HTML report.

Learn how to analyze a compass report from SQL Server to Babelfish migration, focusing on non-supported features, complexity, and available solutions via CSV and HTML reports.

Configure babelfish before migration by setting escape hatch to ignore, verify T-SQL compatibility and version, create Northwind database, map babelfish to Postgres schemas, and prepare for AWS DMS migration.

Learn to migrate SQL Server to Babelfish by addressing non-supported features, applying bytea for image data, and loading only primary key tables, then verify in Babelfish and Postgres using Northwind.

Learn to enable and configure S3 storage lens in the AWS console, gaining visibility across buckets and regions, with metrics and a dashboard to monitor usage and optimize costs.

Explore aws dms babelfish data migration by configuring a replication instance, endpoints for sql server and babelfish, and a replication task to move data end-to-end with buffering, using 3.5.1+ engines.

Discover the aws dms components—replication instance, source and target endpoints, and replication tasks—and learn to set up a replication instance to migrate data from SQL Server to the Babelfish cluster.

Learn to create and configure DMS endpoints, including a source SQL Server and a Babelfish target, test connections, and map the Northwind database for replication.

Learn to create a DMS replication task to migrate data from source to target, using mapping rules and case sensitivity handling.

Explore AI terminology—from artificial intelligence to generative AI—with examples like Siri and ChatGPT, and learn the machine learning process from data collection and cleaning to deployment.

Explore Amazon AI and ML services, focusing on SageMaker for building, training, and deploying models, and Bedrock for FMS via API. Learn Comprehend and Translate enable NLP and speech capabilities.

Discover AI use cases across entertainment, retail, and finance, including computer vision, natural language processing, document processing, and fraud detection, plus machine learning techniques like supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning.

Define prompts as inputs that guide an AI model to produce desired output, and learn how a correct prompt yields precise output with domain-specific knowledge and high-quality results.

Explore prompt building blocks: instruction, context, input and example, and output indicator, to craft precise, efficient prompts for AI tasks.

Explore GenAI capabilities such as adaptability, responsiveness, simplicity, personalization, and scalability, and how models tailor content to tasks and contexts while managing regulatory, data security, privacy, toxicity, and hallucinations risks.

Learn how Amazon Textract, a machine learning service, extracts text, handwriting, and layout data from scanned documents (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PDF) and outputs key-value pairs or tables.

Explore how Amazon Textract analyzes documents, detects layout, extracts key-value pairs, forms, and tables, and makes data queryable through a live demo and pay-as-you-go pricing.

Discover Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service delivering fast, high-quality, customizable translations in batch or real time, enabling localization and S3-based input and output.

Explore Amazon Translate in the AWS console, discover real-time and batch translation, with S3 input, terminology, parallel data, and metrics to monitor performance.

Explore Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed gen AI service offering a range of foundation models from Meta, Anthropic, and more, with safeguards, orchestration with knowledge bases, and retrieval augmented generation.

Explore Amazon Bedrock in the AWS console, review foundation models like Titan variants and embeddings, then learn to use the API and test prompts and image generation.

Discover Amazon Q, with business and developer flavors, a generative AI assistant that answers questions, summarizes content, and generates code from your enterprise data through plugins and IAM Identity Center.

Explore Amazon q variants—general for docs, business for company data, and developer with Codewhisperer integration. Compare free tier and pro pricing, then generate cli commands and code templates for languages.

Amazon Comprehend is a fully managed, serverless natural language processing service that extracts phrases, entities, language, sentiment, and PII from text, enabling insights from transcripts and documents.

Explore how Amazon Comprehend works in the AWS console, analyze sample text to extract entities, PII, sentiment, key phrases, language, and syntax, and customize outputs with custom classifications.

Explore how Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) integrates human review with AWS SageMaker to refine model outputs, routing high-confidence results to clients and low-confidence cases to human reviewers for scoring feedback.

Demonstrates using Amazon augmented AI in the AWS console to create a human review workflow, configure S3 outputs and IAM roles, and define content review tasks including explicit content.

Explore how cost allocation tags, including user-defined and AWS-created tags, help control AWS costs by tagging resources for projects and environments, generating reports, and enabling automation.

Learn how cost allocation tags control AWS spending by tagging resources with project and environment, enabling tag-based billing reports and Lambda-driven enforcement and notifications.

Explore how AWS Organization centralizes governance with a root account and organizational units, applies service control policies, and enables consolidated billing for volume discounts and centralized cost visibility.

Create, manage AWS budgets to monitor costs and receive alerts as you near thresholds. Choose budget types like cost, usage, and reserve instance utilization, and get weekly and monthly reports.

Explore AWS Trusted Advisor, an automatic tool that guides cost optimization, security, and performance across services like EBS and RDS, highlighting idle resources and misconfigurations.

Optimize EC2 costs by selecting instance types such as Graviton and flex m7i, choosing on-demand, saving plans, or spot pricing, and enabling auto scaling with Compute Optimizer and Trusted Advisor.

Leverage S3 storage lens to gain organization-wide visibility into storage, usage, and activity, and optimize cost and data protection across buckets and prefixes with 29 metrics (15 free, 14 advanced).

Learn to optimize RDS costs by monitoring compute and storage with CloudWatch, right-sizing, shutting down idle instances, using Aurora Serverless, tuning SQL, and managing data lifecycle and indexes.

Explore AWS networking basics by understanding IP addresses, CIDR ranges, and configuring VPC subnets and security groups to manage access in cloud infrastructure.

Learn how AWS VPC creates a logically isolated virtual network and gives you control over IP ranges, subnets, route tables, and internet gateway to manage public and private traffic.

Explore how AWS VPC subnets work, including region and availability zone scope, implicit inter-subnet routing, and the use of public and private subnets with routing tables.

Learn to create a new VPC in AWS, including defaults, subnets, route tables, and an internet gateway, plus a quick option that automatically creates public and private subnets.

Explore VPC peering for secure private communication between two VPCs without internet access. Learn that peering is non-transitive and limited to a single connection per VPC pair.

Discover how AWS Direct Connect creates a high speed, low latency link between on-premises networks and AWS services, bypassing the public internet for faster, secure access.

Explore how site-to-site VPN enables encrypted connectivity between an Amazon VPC and on-prem networks over the public internet, and how Transit Gateway interconnects multiple VPCs for hybrid cloud.

Learn how VPC endpoints let EC2 apps access S3, KMS, and Secrets Manager over the AWS backbone, avoiding the public internet and boosting security, scalability, and metrics.

Compare NACLs and security groups in AWS VPC: NACLs are stateless, subnet-level rules (allow or deny) evaluated by number; security groups are stateful, instance-level, allow-only rules.

Learn how to configure network ACLs and security groups in a VPC, including default rules, inbound and outbound traffic, subnet associations, and per-instance access controls.

Learn how a NAT gateway with an Elastic IP enables private subnet instances to access the internet through a public subnet and an internet gateway, while preventing external access.

Explore how Route 53 translates domain names to IP addresses and routes traffic using latency, geolocation, and failover across IPv4 and IPv6. Discover simple, weighted, and geolocation routing policies.

Explore AWS application services including Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, and Kinesis, and learn to design serverless, scalable, cost-effective integrations with queues, notifications, and restful endpoints.

Explore AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that scales automatically, reduces maintenance, and cuts costs, with practical limits on memory, duration, and deployment package.

Leverage AWS Kinesis to collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data with streams, Firehose, analytics, and video streams, delivering to S3, Redshift, and Elasticsearch for smart city analytics.

Explore building a serverless reviews workflow with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and IAM, including table creation, access permissions, and deploying a function to store reviews.

attach cloudwatch logs full access policy to the lambda role, test the function, and view logs in CloudWatch; then configure an sqs trigger to invoke Lambda and write to DynamoDB.

Learn how to use sns and sqs for fan-out messaging, create topics, subscribe endpoints, publish messages to email, sms, push notifications, and queues, and explore sns-sqs integration.