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aws

AWS, hands-on

Deploy real systems on Amazon's cloud — the core model, compute, storage and networking — and come out ready for the AWS Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate exams.

9 units·31 lessons·~10 h

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00

Start from zero

What AWS actually is, and the handful of words the rest of the track assumes.
01 What AWS actually is 15 min
01

The core model

Regions, IAM and billing — the three things every AWS decision touches.
01 Regions and availability zones 16 min 02 IAM and the shared-responsibility model 17 min 03 Billing and cost basics 15 min
02

Compute & deploy

EC2 vs containers vs serverless — and shipping a container end to end.
01 Compute options: EC2, ECS/Fargate, Lambda, App Runner 18 min 02 Deploy a container end to end 18 min 03 Lambda in depth: cold starts, concurrency, and event sources 19 min 04 Autoscaling and load balancing: ALB, NLB, and target tracking 19 min 05 ECS internals: task lifecycle, awsvpc networking, capacity providers 19 min
03

Storage

Pick the right AWS storage for the job — object, block, file, or database.
01 S3 object storage: classes, lifecycle, presigned URLs, durability 18 min 02 Block and file storage: EBS, EFS, and instance store 18 min 03 Managed databases: RDS, Aurora, and DynamoDB 18 min
04

Networking

The VPC and how traffic flows — subnets, gateways, and the rules that gate it.
01 VPC and subnets: CIDR, routing, and the NAT egress trap 18 min 02 Security groups and network ACLs: two filters, two state models 17 min 03 DNS and CDN: Route 53, CloudFront, and ACM at the edge 18 min
05

Observability

See what your AWS workload is doing — metrics, logs, traces, events.
01 CloudWatch: metrics, logs, alarms, and the bill 18 min 02 Distributed tracing and event-driven plumbing: X-Ray and EventBridge 20 min 03 SLOs, error budgets, and alerts that don't cry wolf 19 min 04 Logs at scale: Logs Insights, subscription pipelines, and the bill 19 min 05 OpenTelemetry on AWS: unified signals and the cardinality trap 19 min
06

Infrastructure as code

Define infrastructure as code — CloudFormation, CDK, and Terraform.
01 Infrastructure as code on AWS: CloudFormation and CDK 20 min 02 Terraform on AWS: providers, state, and the remote backend 20 min 03 Terraform state operations: import, move, and the destroy-by-rename trap 19 min 04 Modules and multi-account: composition, environments, blast radius 19 min 05 IaC pipelines: plan-on-PR, policy-as-code, and drift 19 min
07

Cost & security

Cheap and hardened — the cost levers and the IAM/KMS controls that protect you.
01 Cost optimization: purchase options, egress, idle waste, and visibility 18 min 02 IAM evaluation deep dive, KMS envelope encryption, and Secrets Manager 20 min 03 Data protection: S3 public-access, encryption, and the breach class 19 min 04 Threat detection and audit: CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Config, Security Hub 19 min 05 Cost governance: budgets, anomaly alerts, and the surprise bill 19 min
08

Putting it together

Design a secure, observable, cost-aware 3-tier AWS architecture end to end.
01 Capstone: a secure, resilient three-tier architecture end to end 22 min

Build with this track

Guided projects that exercise what you learn here.

◆ Projects

Presigned upload flow

Direct-to-storage uploads via presigned URLs with size/content-type limits and a completion webhook that verifies the object actually arrived — so your API server never touches file bytes.
◆ Projects

Three-Tier App on AWS, by IaC

Stand up a real three-tier system on AWS — a load balancer in front, a compute tier in the middle, a managed Postgres behind it, and S3 for objects — entirely from code you can re-run. The point isn't to click through a console once; it's to express the whole topology, its IAM, and its network boundaries as Terraform (or CDK) you could hand to a teammate, destroy, and recreate byte-for-byte. This is the project where 'infrastructure' stops being a pile of consoles and becomes a reviewable artifact.
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