AWS Cloud

Cloud fundamentals and the core Amazon Web Services, from first principles to the Cloud Practitioner exam.

Beginner

  1. What is Cloud Computing?: Renting computing resources over the internet, on demand, and paying only for what you use.
  2. AWS Global Infrastructure: Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations, and how to pick where your workload runs.
  3. Interacting with AWS: Everything is an API call: the Console, CLI, SDKs, and infrastructure as code with CloudFormation.
  4. Amazon EC2 Basics: Virtual servers in the cloud: instances, AMIs, instance types, and how the hypervisor shares hardware.
  5. EC2 Pricing Options: On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot, Dedicated Hosts and Capacity Reservations - and when each fits.
  6. The Shared Responsibility Model: Who secures what: AWS secures the cloud itself, you secure what you put in it.
  7. IAM Basics: Identity and Access Management: users, groups, roles, policies, MFA, and least privilege.

Intermediate

  1. Auto Scaling and Load Balancing: Add and remove EC2 capacity automatically and spread traffic across it with Elastic Load Balancing.
  2. Messaging: SQS, SNS and EventBridge: Decouple components with queues and publish/subscribe topics so one failure does not cascade.
  3. Serverless and Containers: Lambda, ECS, EKS and Fargate: running code without managing servers, and choosing the right compute.
  4. VPC Networking: Your private network in AWS: subnets, internet and NAT gateways, VPN, and Direct Connect.
  5. Network Security: Security Groups and NACLs: Two firewall layers in a VPC: stateful security groups on resources and stateless network ACLs on subnets.
  6. DNS and CDN: Route 53 and CloudFront: Translate names to addresses with Route 53, and serve content from edge locations with CloudFront.
  7. Block, File and Object Storage: Instance store, EBS, EFS and S3: choosing a storage type, S3 classes, lifecycle rules, durability and availability.
  8. AWS Database Services: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift and the specialised and migration database services.
  9. Monitoring and Auditing: CloudWatch for performance, CloudTrail for who-did-what, Config for resource state, and Trusted Advisor for advice.
  10. AWS Analytics Services: Athena, Kinesis, Glue, QuickSight, EMR, OpenSearch Service, MSK, Data Exchange and Redshift - which analytics tool fits which data job.
  11. Application Integration Services: EventBridge, Step Functions, SNS and SQS recap, API Gateway, SES and Amazon Connect - connecting applications and people.
  12. Developer and End-User Tools: CloudShell, Cloud9, the Code* CI/CD suite, X-Ray, AppConfig, Amplify, AppSync, Device Farm, WorkSpaces, AppStream 2.0 and IoT.
  13. Governance and Management Services: Config, Control Tower, Systems Manager, Service Catalog, License Manager, Compute Optimizer, Resource Groups, Launch Wizard, Health and Audit Manager.

Advanced

  1. AWS Security Services: Organizations and SCPs, Artifact, Shield, WAF, KMS, Inspector, GuardDuty, Security Hub and Macie.
  2. Pricing, Billing and Support: How AWS charges, cost tools (Calculator, Budgets, Cost Explorer), consolidated billing, tags, support plans and Marketplace.
  3. Migration and Innovation: CAF perspectives, the 7 Rs of migration, data transfer tools, and AWS AI/ML services.
  4. The Well-Architected Framework: The six pillars, their design principles, the Well-Architected Tool, and a multi-AZ example.
  5. Support Plans and Partner Resources: Support plans, Support Center, re:Post, Knowledge Center, Partner Network, Marketplace, Professional Services, Solutions Architects, IQ, AMS and Activate.
  6. AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam (CLF-C02): Exam format and domains, a study plan, question strategies, and a task-statement map, and a 25-question practice set.