Hello and welcome to this introductory learning path, which has been designed to help you gain an overview of some of the core and fundamental AWS services.

Throughout this learning path, you will develop your technical understanding across AWS foundational, database, management, and security services, enabling you to begin to turn your business requirements into practical solutions. You will be guided via our courses, hands-on labs, blog posts, and an assessment exam at the end, to ensure you have a solid understanding of the content discussed.

Let’s take a look at some of the different AWS services that we shall be focusing on:

There are a number foundational services that AWS is built upon which we shall cover, and these include:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - EC2 is likely to be the first compute service that you will encounter when working with AWS and it allows you to deploy virtual servers within your AWS environment

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) - A VPC is essentially your own isolated segment of the AWS Cloud itself and by default, no one else can gain access to your VPC other than your own AWS account.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) - S3 is probably the most heavily used storage service that is provided by AWS as it's a great fit for many different use cases. It’s a fully managed, object-based storage service that is highly available, highly durable, very cost-effective, and widely accessible.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) - EBS provides storage to your EC2 instances as EBS volumes, which provide persistent and durable block level storage

In addition to these foundational services, we shall also be looking at how you can manage AWS permissions through the AWS security service, AWS Identity and Access Management, or as it’s more commonly referred to, IAM.

We will also be looking at two of the most common AWS database services that are in use today, these being:

Amazon DynamoDB - This is a NoSQL database, which means that it doesn't use the common structured query language, SQL. It's designed to be used for ultra-high performance which can be maintained at any scale with single-digit latency, making this a very powerful database choice used commonly for gaming, web, mobile and IoT applications

Amazon RDS, as the name suggests, is a relational database service that provides a simple way to provision, create, and scale a relational database within AWS using a variety of different database engine types.

Understanding the essentials of AWS wouldn’t be complete without taking a look at some of the management services that it provides, and so we shall look at the following four services and features:

AWS EC2 Auto Scaling - Auto Scaling is a mechanism that automatically allows you to increase or decrease your EC2 resources to meet the demand based off of custom-defined metrics and thresholds

Amazon CloudWatch - CloudWatch is a comprehensive monitoring tool that allows you to monitor your services and applications in the cloud.

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) - The main function of an Elastic Load Balancer, commonly referred to as an ELB, is to help manage and control the flow of inbound requests to a group of targets by distributing these requests evenly across a targeted resource group, such as a fleet of EC2 instances

AWS Trusted Advisor - This service plays an integral part in helping you to optimize your AWS resources and infrastructure across a number of key areas by recommending improvements throughout your AWS account

Ok, so now you have an understanding of what’s involved in this learning path, let’s get you started, and if you have any questions as you progress through your training, please feel free to reach out to us here by sending an email to support@cloudacademy.com.

Introduction: Technical Essentials of AWS