Cloud Computing on AWS: Ultimate Beginners Course

Explore general IT concepts, from client-server basics to traditional data centers, and learn how cloud computing, virtual servers, and hybrid cloud address scaling, reliability, and cost.

Explore the three main cloud deployment models—public, private, and hybrid—and learn how providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP support cloud resources.

Explore the three cloud types: infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service, along with examples and what the provider manages versus you, from on premises to cloud deployments.

Learn how AWS regions are clusters of data centers in a global infrastructure, with examples like US east 1 in North Virginia and Tokyo.

Explore the virtual private cloud (vpc) as a secure, isolated section of the cloud within a region that enables launching resources. See how a vpc fits region and availability zone.

Explore AWS availability zones as data centers within a region, with a minimum of two and a maximum of six, to ensure high availability.

Learn how public and private subnets within a VPC across availability zones enable or restrict internet access via the Internet gateway and net gateway, guided by route tables.

Discover how edge locations serve as the nearest point of presence to users worldwide, delivering content with low latency for pdf files, images, and videos.

Create your AWS account by signing up for a free account, entering your email and account name, and verifying your email, guided by a downloadable PDF in the resources folder.

Explore the AWS management console and customize your workspace by removing widgets, setting the region to US East (Ohio), and pinning frequently used services like EC2 and Lambda.

Create and customize a designated budget in AWS to track costs, set a monthly budget, include all services, and configure alerts at 80% with email notifications.

Learn to create an IAM user and a group, attach administrator access and password-change policies, then add the user to the group for secure, policy-driven access.

Learn to sign in as an IAM user using the default URL or an account alias to customize sign-in link, replacing the long account ID with a unique, standards-based address.

Create a unique AWS sign-in URL by setting an account alias and sign in with your IAM user credentials, then save the URL and credentials securely.

Learn to secure AWS accounts by enabling MFA on IAM and root users using an authenticator app, scanning a QR code, and entering consecutive codes.

Access AWS using the management console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDK to manage resources and connect web applications to services like RDS, safely handling access keys.

Generate AWS access keys via IAM for a chosen user, using a practical use case. Learn secure retrieval, best practices, and key rotation to protect credentials.

Install the AWS CLI v2 across Windows, macOS, or Linux, complete the lab setup steps, and verify the installation with the version check.

Define and enforce IAM password policies in AWS, detailing length and character diversity, symbol requirements, and periodic password changes to protect multiple users.

Participate in a hands-on lab to create a custom IAM password policy by editing account settings, setting a 10-character minimum and 90-day expiration with administrator reset.

Discover IAM security tools, including Access Advisor to audit service permissions and user eligibility. Generate a credentials report to view all users in your account for auditing and compliance.

Assign permissions to AWS services with IAM roles, enabling services like Lambda to perform actions automatically using attached roles, such as CloudWatch Logs for Lambda events and logs.

Create an IAM role by selecting a trusted entity, choosing a service like EC2, and attaching read-only IAM permissions so EC2 instances can call AWS services on your behalf.

Apply IAM best practices by avoiding the root account, enabling MFA for the root and all users, enforcing a password policy, never sharing IAM credentials, and grouping users with policies.

Learn how Amazon EC2 provides on-demand virtual servers as infrastructure as a service, enabling autoscaling, elastic load balancing, and storage options like EBS and EFS in a VPC.

Launch your first EC2 instance on AWS. Choose a free-tier AMI and t2 micro, create a key pair, and set security groups for http and ssh.

Learn to stop and start an EC2 instance, wait for the stopped state, and handle status checks, while noting public IPv4 addresses change after each stop and start.

Discover how EC2 security groups act as firewalls, controlling inbound and outbound traffic through rules by IPs or security groups, including ports 22, 80, and 443.

Explore and modify EC2 security groups by viewing inbound and outbound rules, enabling HTTP on port 80 and SSH on port 22, and applying a CIDR block anywhere IPv4.

Learn how EC2 instance type notation works, using t3 micro as an example, and review general purpose, compute, memory, storage, and accelerated computing families.

Explore AWS EC2 instance types through the dropdown, noting t2, t3, and c4 families and sizes from micro to large, across general purpose, compute, memory, and storage categories.

Learn how to SSH into an EC2 Linux instance from Windows, using the security group and port 22 to securely access the remote command line.

Connect to your EC2 instance via SSH using Putty on Windows, using your key pair, the public IPv4 address, and port 22, then save the session for reuse.

Learn how to use EC2 instance connect as a browser-based alternative to SSH for accessing EC2 instances via AWS, and ensure port 22 is open in outbound security group rules.

Connect to an EC2 instance using EC2 Instance Connect, verify the running instance, and issue commands from the browser-based console in this lab.

Stop and terminate an EC2 instance to clean up resources, verifying termination and no public or private IPs. Ensure zero running instances and no charges, with security groups unaffected.

Explore EC2 instance pricing options, including on-demand per-second pricing for unpredictable workloads, plus reserved and spot options, with discounts and risk, and dedicated hosts for physical servers.

Explore EC2 instance pricing options, including on-demand, savings plans, reserved and spot instances, dedicated hosts and capacity reservations, with pay-by-the-second pricing and the free tier.

Choose either the Amazon Linux 2023 AMI or the Amazon Linux 2 AMI VM kernel 510 to stay in the free tier, and double-check the Quickstart AMI selection.

Explore how AMI works by launching EC2 instances with public AMIs such as Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Windows, Red Hat, and SUSE, plus third-party and custom AMIs from the AWS marketplace.

Learn to launch a simple EC2 instance, configure security and user data to run Apache, then create and deploy a custom AMI from the instance and clean up resources.

Define scalability in cloud computing and how apps scale up or down, comparing vertical scalability with a single bigger instance to horizontal scalability with multiple instances.

Explore high availability in cloud computing by designing resilient services across multiple availability zones, illustrated with a bank's service desk rerouting during outages to minimize disruption.

Discover how elastic load balancing distributes traffic across ec2 instances using application and network load balancers, with health checks, ssl termination, and domain-name routing replacing public ip addresses.

Create an application load balancer, launch two EC2 instances, and configure a security group and target group to route HTTP traffic to the instances behind a DNS-enabled load balancer.

Watch how an active application load balancer distributes traffic across two EC2 instances via DNS names. Public IPv4s change after restarts; private IPv4s stay constant, supported by status checks.

Learn how auto scaling groups (ASG) manage EC2 instances with a minimum, maximum, and desired capacity, scale out and in, and integrate with the elastic load balancer.

Create a launch template to define EC2 properties for an autoscaling group, selecting an AMI, t2 micro, key pair, security group, and user data.

Create an auto scaling group with a launch template, attach a load balancer and target group across three availability zones, and set desired, minimum, and maximum capacity.

Dive into autoscaling groups with a hands-on deep dive: configure launch templates, monitor health checks, manage dynamic and predictive scaling, and perform instance refresh with a load balancer.

Test and validate our autoscaling group by launching two EC2 instances behind a load balancer, then adjust design, minimum, and maximum capacity to observe scaling behavior.

Delete the auto scaling group to remove all running EC2 instances, then delete the load balancer and target group after ensuring no instances remain.

Learn how to create unique Amazon S3 buckets, store files as objects, and use S3 for backup, disaster recovery, and hosting static websites.

Create and name an amazon s3 bucket, upload files as objects, manage access with default block public access, and explore versioning, encryption, and object urls for later policy work.

Explore how Amazon S3 bucket policies, as JSON documents, grant access to a bucket and its objects by defining resource, action, principal, and effect.

Create an S3 bucket policy to allow public read access to all objects by turning off block public access, generating a JSON policy, and applying it to every object.

Learn to host a static website on AWS S3 by placing index.html in the bucket root, enable static website hosting, and serve via the bucket endpoint.

Learn how Amazon S3 bucket versioning stores multiple file versions, enabling automatic updates and easy rollback to earlier versions.

Log all S3 bucket access requests to a dedicated logging bucket to enable audits and investigate suspicious activity within an AWS account.

Set up S3 server access logging by creating a source bucket and a dedicated logging destination, enabling logging, and collecting access events into log files for analysis.

Explore Amazon S3 replication options, including cross region replication and same region replication, moving objects from us east 2 to eu west 2, while ensuring versioning on source and destination.

Explore Amazon S3 storage classes, including standard general purpose for frequent access, one zone infrequent access, glacier archiving, and Intelligent-tiering that moves objects between access tiers.

Learn how to enable object lock on an Amazon S3 bucket, apply write-once-read-many retention in compliance mode, and use bucket versioning to protect and temporarily disable deletion of objects.

Learn to clean up Amazon S3 resources by deleting objects, emptying buckets, and then deleting the buckets themselves, following step-by-step lab instructions.

Explore storage options for EC2 by comparing EBS and EFS (network-based storage) with instance store (hardware-based storage) and learn when to use each.

Explore Amazon elastic block store (EBS) volumes and their attachment to a single EC2 instance. Learn AZ-specific constraints and how snapshots enable cross-AZ movement, with a note on multi attach.

Explore how to back up and migrate EBS volumes using snapshots across availability zones and regions, with workflows for creating, storing in S3, and restoring volumes to different AZs.

Create and manage EBS snapshots from unattached volumes, then create volumes from them. Copy snapshots for disaster recovery, and use the recycle bin with retention rules.