AWS Technical Essentials - Build Real World Projects

Understand how the root user defines ownership of your AWS account and avoid CLI use. Enable MFA, use IAM with least privilege, and note root manages billing.

Enforce a strong IAM password policy in the AWS console, requiring 12-character passwords with uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols, plus 42-day expiration and no reuse of the last six passwords.

Set up an IAM group and user in the development account, attach the administrator access policy to the senior admins group, and test login as James using the account alias.

Learn how IAM policies are created and applied to groups using JSON, including AWS managed, customer managed, and inline policies, with examples of ARN formats and conditional rules.

Learn to access AWS via the command line using the AWS CLI. Configure named profiles for development and production using access keys, rotate keys, and manage S3 buckets.

Learn to create an IAM role for cross-account access, issuing temporary credentials via STS and enforcing least privilege for a production account using a trusted development account.

Discover resource-based policies, such as bucket policies, that attach to resources and define a principal for cross-account access with actions like get, list, and put on S3 buckets.

Explore AWS IAM security tools like credentials report and Access Advisor to audit users, enforce least privileges, and identify external access risks with Access Analyzer.

Explore block, file, and object storage on AWS, focusing on use cases for databases, shared file access, and unstructured data. Learn key trade-offs in performance, scalability, and durability.

Explore Amazon S3 as a global object storage solution; learn buckets, objects, metadata, prefixes and delimiters, and how region choices and access methods shape usage.

Create an amazon s3 bucket, apply a bucket policy for get, put, and list, and manage access via iam users and cli with s3 managed keys.

Learn how to configure cross-account Amazon S3 replication from a source bucket to a destination bucket, including versioning, IAM role, and bucket policy, via the AWS Management Console.

Explore private IP ranges and NAT to relieve IPv4 scarcity, enabling internal networks to share a public address, while port numbers route traffic to services.

Explore IPv4 addresses and subnetting to build and isolate multiple networks within a larger network, understanding network and host portions and slash 24 notation.

Master ip addressing and subnetting by using cidr notation to create multiple subnets, understand network versus host portions, and apply bitwise operations and reserved addresses for efficient, secure networks.

Design and size a custom AWS VPC for a real-world web app, detailing IP planning, CIDR blocks, subnets across availability zones, and multi-region, multi-account environments.

Build a complete end-to-end custom VPC for the richer roast web app in the London region, manually configuring subnets, route tables, NAT gateways, and security groups.

Deploy an internet gateway, attach it to your VPC, and enable internet access for resources in your public subnets; learn how route tables and IPv4/IPv6 support traffic.

Create a dedicated public route table, attach public subnets to it with a route to the internet gateway, and enable auto assign public IPv4 addresses to access the internet directly.

Explore how NAT gateways enable private subnets to access the internet via a public subnet, using one-to-many NAT, elastic IPs, and route table configurations, compared with NAT instances.

Explore how network access control lists protect subnets by enforcing stateless inbound and outbound rules. Understand ephemeral ports and the role of security groups in AWS VPC traffic.

Explore AWS security groups in a VPC, a stateful firewall with implicit deny and inbound allow rules, plus self-referencing and group-to-group access for auto scaling web fleets.

Set up three security groups in a VPC—load balancer, web app, database—and configure inbound rules to route traffic on port 80 to the web app and 3306 to the database.

Explore Amazon EC2 and on-demand scalable compute capacity to deploy virtual machines in the cloud, using auto scaling, security, networking, and managed storage options.

Identify how to select an EC2 instance type by matching compute, memory, storage, and network needs with general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, and accelerated computing categories.

Launch an EC2 instance in a public subnet using an AMI, key pair, IP addressing, security groups, EBS volumes, IAM role, and bastion host access.

Explore AWS EC2 pricing options, including on-demand, reserved, spot, and dedicated hosts, and learn how savings plans reduce compute and storage costs.

Explore how elastic block store volumes attach to EC2 instances in the same availability zone, manage multi attach volumes, and use snapshots for regional disaster recovery.

Provision Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes to EC2 instances for persistent storage, then compare with instance store volumes, which are ephemeral and tied to the host at launch.

Compare provisioned iops ebs volumes, including io1 and io2 block express, their sizes, iops, and throughput; note the io2 block express upgrade and bootable support on nitro systems.

Learn to create, attach, and mount EBS volumes on Linux in a VPC, format with ext4, and use snapshots—including cross-region copy—to manage data across Windows and Linux environments.

Launch an EC2 instance from a corporate AMI using a user data script to copy website files from S3 and install Apache, with IAM role for S3 access in London.

Learn how AWS elastic load balancing distributes traffic to healthy targets across availability zones using application, network, and gateway load balancers, with health checks and path-based and host-based routing.

Deploy an internet-facing application load balancer in the AWS management console to distribute traffic in round-robin across two EC2 web servers in two availability zones, using health.html checks.

Discover how AWS auto scaling automatically adjusts capacity to meet demand. Explore EC2 auto scaling, application auto scaling, CloudWatch monitoring, health checks, and minimum, desired, maximum capacity.

Discover AWS serverless services that automate compute, data, and integration tasks, with automatic scaling and pay-as-you-go models, including Lambda, API Gateway, S3, and DynamoDB.

Explore AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that runs code without provisioning servers, scales automatically, supports multiple languages, and triggers from HTTP, S3, and more.

Explore provisioning an Amazon RDS database, including engine choices, instance class and size, storage options, and the DB subnet group within a VPC for high availability with Multi-AZ.

Deploy an RDS instance in a two-availability-zone subnet group, configure security groups for MySQL traffic, and provision a MySQL database in the AWS Management Console.

Explore multi-az options in Amazon RDS to achieve high availability with a primary and standby, backed by synchronous replication and standby backups.

Explore how automated backups, manual snapshots, and multi-az failover protect Amazon RDS data, with transaction logs enabling near five-minute restores and replication across region.

Explore how Amazon RDS read replicas offload reads from the writeable primary, enable asynchronous replication, support backups, cross-region recovery, and promote to a primary.

Explore how Amazon CloudWatch monitors resources, collects metrics, and triggers alarms to automate actions, visualize dashboards, and integrate with SNS, CloudTrail, and autoscaling.

Explore AWS Trusted Advisor to analyze your environment and improve security posture, performance, fault tolerance, and cost optimization, with simple traffic-light checks and plan-based access.

Learn how AWS Systems Manager Run Command remotely manages EC2, edge devices, and on-premises servers using the SSM agent and IAM roles to run shell or PowerShell commands from S3.

Learn to securely manage EC2 instances with AWS Systems Manager Session Manager, enable encrypted CloudWatch logs via KMS, update IAM policies, and verify encrypted sessions and log auditing.

Discover how AWS CloudTrail audits and governs cross-account activity across regions, logging management, data, and network events, with analytics in S3 using Athena and monitoring via CloudWatch and EventBridge.

See how CloudTrail records all API calls and events in AWS by walking through a Control Tower trail, viewing event history, and analyzing a terminated EC2 instance.

Architect, design, and implement a real-world recipe contest solution for the Vacant Studio to boost brand awareness, engagement, and sales across its vegan cafe network.

Conduct high availability and failover tests by simulating an unhealthy ec2 instance, triggering auto scaling to replace it, and promoting standby rds in a multi-az setup with dns updates.

Create a London region vpc with 10.0.0.0/16, six subnets, and an internet gateway; deploy a nat gateway and set up public and main route tables with http and mysql rules.

Deploy a MySQL RDS database with multi-AZ in the VPC you created earlier, using a DB subnet group across two availability zones to host recipes posted by users.

Set up an application load balancer with a target group and health checks to distribute traffic to EC2 instances, then configure auto scaling and DNS routing.

Configure auto scaling with a launch template and an auto scaling group to deploy EC2 instances behind a load balancer, connect to the RDS database, and update db.php in S3.

Test and explore a three-tier AWS web app behind a load balancer, submit and retrieve vegan recipes via a web interface, and perform end-to-end CRUD against the backend database.

Run high-availability and auto-scaling tests in the AWS console, simulate a health-check failure by removing health.html, confirm the load balancer promotes healthy instances and auto scaling replaces unhealthy ones.

Demonstrate a multi-az failover test for an RDS MySQL database using reboot with failover in the AWS console, confirming a successful master failover and continued application operation.

Learn to clean up a multi-tier AWS project by terminating resources like autoscaling groups, load balancers, RDS multi-AZ, NAT gateways, VPC components, and S3 buckets to avoid extra costs.