Introduction to Cloud Computing on AWS for Beginners [2026]

Explore Amazon Web Services and understand what AWS is before diving into practical elements, noting this pure theory section has no hands-on lessons.

Explore AWS global infrastructure, including regions, availability zones, data centers, and subnets. Learn how Outposts, Local Zones, Wavelength Zones, and CloudFront improve global performance and low latency.

Understand the Aws shared responsibility model: you manage data, users, groups, roles, and policies. Aws secures the cloud infrastructure and services, while you handle encryption and patching.

Explore how application programming interfaces enable programs to talk via http/https using ports and methods like get, post, put, and delete on AWS.

Explore AWS pricing fundamentals across compute, storage, and outbound data transfer for EC2, S3, and EBS. Compare pay-as-you-go and reserved capacity discounts up to 75%.

Explore the six advantages of cloud computing on AWS, including trading capex for opex, economies of scale, capacity planning, speed and agility, and global deployment.

Explore authentication and access control in AWS, focusing on IAM basics (users, groups, roles, policies) and IAM Identity Center for single sign-on and identity federation across accounts and apps.

Learn how AWS identity and access management (IAM) authenticates and authorizes users, groups, and roles through identity-based and resource-based policies, enabling secure access to AWS resources.

Create an iam user and an admin group, attach administrator access, add the user to the group, and log in to the management console as that user.

Explore how iam roles provide temporary access via sts assume role, enabling controlled permissions for users and services, and learn how identity-based and resource-based policies define access in aws.

Create an IAM user, define an EC2 full-access role, and enable switch role with STS assume role to grant temporary EC2 permissions under the principle of least privilege.

Discover AWS IAM Identity Center, a centralized single sign-on and identity management solution that extends to AWS accounts and external apps with built-in federation and multiple identity sources.

Enable IAM identity Center in an AWS organization, configure identity source and MFA, create groups, users, and permission sets, and access accounts via management console or command line.

Discover Amazon EC2 fundamentals, including server virtualization and launching virtual servers in the cloud. Scale with auto scaling and load balancing across availability zones for high availability.

Explore server virtualization and how a hypervisor creates virtual machines on a single server. See how portability, improved resource utilization, cost efficiency, and scalable deployment power cloud computing on AWS.

Compare scaling up versus scaling out in AWS, recognizing stateless versus stateful apps. Learn to externalize state with EFS, DynamoDB, or RDS and use load balancing.

Explore high availability versus fault tolerance on AWS, design redundancy across availability zones with elastic load balancing, auto scaling, and Route 53, and understand durability vs availability.

Launch on-demand Amazon EC2 virtual servers in AWS data centers, configure VPC networking with ENIs, choose instance types and EBS storage, and distinguish public and private subnets.

Launch Linux and Windows EC2 instances on AWS, choose instance type and AMI, manage key pairs and security groups, and connect via SSH or RDP.

Connect to Linux and Windows EC2 instances using SSH and RDP. Learn to use EC2 instance connect, Session Manager, and key pairs while configuring security groups and terminating instances.

Compare access keys and IAM roles for EC2 permissions on S3 via the AWS CLI, noting long-term key risks and recommending IAM roles with STS for secure, short-lived credentials.

Learn to configure the AWS CLI with access keys and IAM roles, demonstrate securing credentials on EC2, and use temporary role permissions for S3 access.

Launch an EC2 instance with a user data script that installs and starts the Apache web server, creates a simple index page, and displays the instance's availability zone.

Explore Amazon EC2 auto scaling to maintain availability and scale your cluster automatically, using CloudWatch metrics and alarms with Elastic Load Balancing across availability zones.

Create and configure an auto scaling group with a launch template, user data, and two EC2 instances across two availability zones, displaying an Apache web page that shows each zone.

Learn how Amazon elastic load balancing ensures high availability by distributing traffic across EC2, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda targets, with health checks and auto scaling.

Create an application load balancer with a dynamic target group for an auto scaling group. Use http port 80 and http health checks to verify targets across two availability zones.

Create a dynamic scaling policy for an auto scaling group and adjust max capacity. Configure target tracking by request count per target with CloudWatch alarms and load balancing.

Explore how Amazon VPC creates a virtual data center in the cloud, defines subnets and IP ranges, and isolates resources with OSI concepts, routers, switches, and firewalls.

Discover the osi model in a clear, layer-by-layer guide from physical to application, covering mac addresses, ip routing, tcp/udp, tls, and http, dns, and ssl.

Discover how switches and routers connect and segment networks, and apply firewall rules, security groups, and network ACLs to manage traffic across AWS VPC subnets.

Explore IPv4 addressing, including dotted decimal notation, binary octets, and subnet masks, to determine network IDs and host IDs with /24, private ranges, and NAT in Amazon VPC.

Explore Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) concepts, including region-based isolation, subnets mapped to availability zones, and route tables that control traffic within and outside the VPC.

Learn to create a custom VPC with public and private subnets across two availability zones, attach an internet gateway, configure route tables, and test connectivity from an EC2 instance.

Learn how security groups and network ACLs protect AWS resources inside a VPC by comparing stateful instance-level filters with stateless subnet-level controls, including inbound and outbound rules.

Explore using security groups and network ACLs in the AWS EC2 console, configuring inbound and outbound rules, testing SSH and HTTP traffic, and applying security group chaining.

Explore cloud deployment models—private, public, hybrid, and multi-cloud—and compare control, security, and cost. Learn how connectivity, software layers, and elasticity shape deployment choices across data centers and public clouds.

Connect on‑premises networks to aws using site-to-site vpn and aws direct connect, including virtual private gateway, customer gateway, routing, encryption, and dx location considerations.

Explore the fundamentals of block-based, file-based, and object-based storage while examining AWS storage services like Elastic Block Store, Elastic File System, and S3.

Differentiate block, file, and object storage by explaining disks and volumes, network-shared file systems, and scalable bucket-based storage accessed via HTTP REST APIs.

Explore Amazon EBS and instance stores to compare block-based persistent storage with ephemeral options in an availability zone, learn snapshot backups, cross-AZ migrations, and AMI creation from snapshots.

Launch two ec2 instances in separate availability zones, create and attach a 10 gb gp3 ebs volume, format ext4, mount at /data, snapshot, and move data to other availability zone.

Launch an ec2 instance with user data to install a web server, create a custom ami, and launch identical servers; manage snapshots and region copies, then deregister the ami.

Learn amazon elastic file system (efs): a linux-only, shared file system with regional and one-zone deployments, nfs access, cross-az mounting, durability, and standard, infrequent access, and archive storage classes.

Create an Amazon elastic file system with the CLI, configure security groups and EC2 instances, mount across availability zones, and enable encryption in transit with the EFS tools.

Explore Amazon s3, an object-based storage system using buckets and objects. Learn how rest api, http urls, and aws sdks enable programmatic access and compare object to file storage.

learn how to create S3 buckets, upload objects, and manage access with bucket policies, public access blocks, encryption options, and storage classes in AWS.

Create an S3 bucket, enable static website hosting, and set index.html as the default document. Upload images, apply a public get objects bucket policy, and view the website endpoint.

Explore AWS database concepts by comparing relational and non-relational databases, and learn to launch and create databases in the cloud, including Amazon relational database service and Amazon Dynamo DB service.

Compare relational and non-relational databases, exploring schemas, storage models, and use cases from OLTP to OLAP, with AWS examples like RDS, Dynamo DB, and Redshift.

Learn Amazon RDS, a managed relational database for OLTP, with engines like Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and MariaDB, plus vertical and horizontal scaling and multi-AZ disaster recovery.

Create an Amazon RDS database in the console, select MySQL as the engine with a free tier option, configure storage, subnet, security group, and obtain the endpoint and port 3306.

Explore Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed serverless NoSQL database that offers key-value and document storage, low-latency reads, push-button scaling, and global tables with streams for change capture.

Create a DynamoDB table named my orders with partition key client ID and sort key created. Load 20 items with batch write and practice scan and query using the CLI.

Explore AWS automation and DevOps basics, including CloudFormation as infrastructure as code and its comparison to Terraform, and discover Elastic Beanstalk for deployment plus CI/CD tools CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline.

Explore infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation, writing template files in JSON or YAML to deploy stacks that create VPC, auto scaling groups, instances, and an elastic load balancer.

Create and update AWS CloudFormation stacks by using YAML templates, configuring an EC2 instance with a security group, attaching an EBS volume, and adding an S3 bucket.

Deploy a VPC with CloudFormation to create public and private subnets across two availability zones, an internet gateway, and outputs, with environment name prefix and configurable parameters.

Discover how Elastic Beanstalk delivers platform as a service by uploading code to create environments with scaling, load balancing, and web servers and workers, application versions stored in a bucket.

Learn how to create and deploy a web server Elastic Beanstalk application on AWS, configure a custom domain name, roles, VPC, and monitor deployments with logs, health, and versions.

Explore CI/CD with AWS developer tools, including CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy, and learn how code moves from repository to deployment in production.

Deploy updates to an Elastic Beanstalk environment using AWS CodePipeline and CodeCommit, then monitor deployments in the Elastic Beanstalk console and push iterative code changes via CloudShell and Git.

Explore Route 53, a smart DNS service with domain registration capabilities. Learn how CloudFront delivers global content quickly and how Global Accelerator speeds access to applications behind load balancers.

Explore the core concepts of bandwidth and latency, including how distance, propagation, transmission, queuing, and processing delays affect network performance across data centers and global links.

Master the domain name system and Amazon Route 53, including DNS records like A, CNAME, MX, and routing policies such as failover, geolocation, and latency.

Register an optional domain with Route 53, check availability, review pricing and auto renew, and set up a hosted zone for DNS management.

Learn how Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network, caches content at global edge locations to reduce latency and improve performance, with Lambda@Edge and robust security features.

Create a secure CloudFront distribution for a static website hosted on S3 by provisioning a bucket, ACM certificate, and a Route 53 alias for https access.

Explore how AWS Global Accelerator uses anycast IP addresses and edge locations to route traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint, reducing latency with health checks for TCP and UDP.

Discover containers and serverless computing on AWS, using Amazon Elastic Container Service and Fargate to run Docker containers, and build cloud native microservices with event driven architecture and AWS Lambda.

Explore docker containers and microservices, compare with virtualization, and learn how Amazon ECS and Lambda enable cloud native architectures with APIs, scalable modular components.

Explore Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), including clusters, tasks defined by task definitions, images from ECR or Docker Hub, and deployments via ECS services with Fargate or EC2 launch types.

Deploy a docker container on AWS Fargate by creating an ECS cluster, defining a task, launching tasks, and optionally configuring a service with networking and auto scaling.

Discover how serverless services on AWS remove instance management, enable automatic scaling and high availability, and drive event-driven architectures that trigger actions from S3 uploads to Lambda, SQS, and DynamoDB.

Explore AWS Lambda, a serverless function service that runs code on triggers with memory-based pricing, IAM execution roles, CloudWatch, and scalable VPC networking.

Learn to create and deploy an AWS Lambda function that logs to CloudWatch, test with console and CLI, and trigger via S3 event notifications while configuring permissions.

Explore how AWS application integration services enable event-driven architectures, linking ecommerce components with EventBridge, SNS, SQS, Lambda, and DynamoDB to achieve decoupled, scalable workflows.

Build a serverless ecommerce prototype using a REST API, AWS Lambda, SQS, and a DynamoDB table, with a static front end and test via CLI and console.

Explore how Amazon API Gateway creates a single public endpoint to route REST API requests to multiple microservices, including Lambda functions, EC2, and DynamoDB, using resources and HTTP methods.

Build a serverless ecommerce workflow on AWS by exposing a REST API via API Gateway, linking a static S3 site to a Lambda submit order function, deployed to prod.

Learn Amazon EventBridge, a scalable event bus that ingests, filters, and routes events from AWS services and custom apps to targets like Lambda, Kinesis, and SQS, enabling event-driven architectures.