Learning Path: AWS: AWS Environments with AWS Lambda

This video gives an overview of the entire course.

In order for the student to follow along with the on-screen examples, they should open up a free AWS Account.

For the first year of your AWS Account, there are many things you can do for free. We will discuss what these are and how to avoid accruing any charges.

The AWS Management Console is the easiest way to launch AWS services. In this video we show you how to navigate the console, access your billing information, and switch regions.

How to launch an EC2 instance from the AWS Management Console.

AWS EC2 instances are available in several types and also various sizes. To get optimum performance and cost, you need to select the correct type and size instance for your application.

There are several types of storage volumes we can use for our EC2 instances. We need to understand the significant differences and trade-offs.

It is very important to keep our instances safe from attacks. Security groups give us a way to protect our instances with firewall rules. These define what type of traffic will be allowed in and out of the instance.

Logging in to an EC2 instance requires that you create a key pair, specify the name of the key pair when you launch the instance, and provide the private key when you connect to the instance.

To connect to EC2 Linux instances, we use SSH and authenticate with a private key. However, the process is different from Windows and Mac/Linux. To other users, to connect requires creating more key pairs.

To connect to EC2 Windows instances, we use RDP and the administrator password. To obtain the password, we need to decrypt it first with the private key.

Defining a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on AWS begins with selecting an IP Address block for the instances that will run in the VPC. This requires an understanding the CIDR notation and the valid private IPv4 addresses ranges.

When you launch an EC2 instance into a VPC, it will be assigned a private IP address. If you want the instance to be reachable from the Internet, you will need to assign it a public or elastic IP address.

Every VPC must contain one or more subnets. Subnets can be configured to be either public or private, depending on whether their instances need to be reachable from the Internet.

VPCs allow you to launch instances into a private network space. There are three primary ways to obtain a VPC including using a pre-defined Default VPC, building your own with the VPC wizard, and creating a completely custom VPC from scratch.

The default VPC will require a lot of modification to be able to provide the level of security we need to protect our instances. The solution is to build our own custom VPC with private subnets and custom route tables.

Once we have a VPC and some private or public instances, we need to be able to securely to connect those instances from outside the VPC. This requires attaching one or more gateways and establishing a secure connection between our data center.

Relying solely on Security Groups for our firewall increases the likelihood that an accidental misconfiguration could leave our databases and other private resources exposed to hackers. Best security practice mandates that we should backup our security groups with an additional layer of security.

Regions on AWS are divided into two or more distinct locations known as Availability Zones (AZs). With the proper architecture, we can leverage multiple AZs to give our applications high availability.