DevOps & Cloud

AWS Fundamentals

The canonical AWS reference course - 169 topics across identity, networking, compute, storage, databases, observability, IaC, security, data, AI/ML, cost and migration.

Beginner1138169 lessons13 free lessonsawsclouddevopsec2lambda

A working engineer's reference to the AWS services that actually come up - in production and in interviews.

This is not a click-through-the-console tour. Each topic explains the service's model, the failure modes, the cost levers, and the decision you are really being asked to make - how to read an instance-type name, when Lambda in a VPC is a mistake, why your NAT Gateway bill exploded, what policy evaluation does when an SCP and a permission boundary disagree.

15 modules, 169 topics, covering the full core surface: foundations and global infrastructure, IAM and organisations, VPC and networking, EC2/Lambda/ECS/EKS, S3 and storage, RDS/Aurora/DynamoDB, messaging and integration, CloudWatch and observability, CloudFormation/CDK/Terraform, security and governance, data and analytics, AI/ML services, FinOps, and migration.

The introduction and foundations material is free to preview. The full course is a one-time purchase with lifetime access.

What you will learn

• Choose the right compute for a workload - EC2 family, Lambda, ECS, EKS, Batch - and justify it
• Design a VPC that works: subnets, gateways, endpoints, Transit Gateway, and what each one costs
• Reason about IAM correctly - policy evaluation, boundaries, SCPs, cross-account roles
• Pick the right data store: RDS vs Aurora vs DynamoDB, and model DynamoDB access patterns
• Instrument systems with CloudWatch, X-Ray, and structured logs that survive an incident
• Ship infrastructure as code with CloudFormation, CDK, or Terraform - and know the trade-offs
• Find and remove the four cost levers that dominate real AWS bills
• Answer AWS interview questions with the depth that separates users from architects

Prerequisites

• Comfortable with the command line and basic networking (IP, DNS, HTTP)
• No prior AWS experience required - module 1 starts at the global infrastructure

Course outline

Module 1: Introduction & Orientation

Introduction & Orientation - 5 topics.

• How to use this course 5 min read
• Choosing your path 6 min read
• Setting up a learning account safely 6 min read
• The AWS service landscape 5 min read
• How AWS knowledge is actually tested 5 min read

Module 2: Foundations & Global Infrastructure

Foundations & Global Infrastructure - 8 topics.

• Regions, Availability Zones, and the failure-domain model 7 min read
• Edge locations, Local Zones, Wavelength, and Outposts 7 min read
• The shared responsibility model 6 min read
• How AWS pricing actually works - the four cost levers 6 min read
• Service quotas and the limits that bite in production 7 min read
• The Well-Architected Framework - six pillars 6 min read
• AWS account structure and the multi-account default 7 min read
• Reading AWS documentation and the service API model 6 min read

Module 3: Identity & Access Management

Identity & Access Management - 12 topics.

• IAM principals: users, groups, and roles 6 min read Pro lesson
• IAM policy anatomy and JSON structure 6 min read Pro lesson
• Policy evaluation logic 6 min read Pro lesson
• IAM roles and sts:AssumeRole 6 min read Pro lesson
• Cross-account access patterns 7 min read Pro lesson
• Resource-based vs identity-based policies 6 min read Pro lesson
• Permission boundaries 6 min read Pro lesson
• AWS Organizations and Service Control Policies 6 min read Pro lesson
• IAM Identity Center and federation 6 min read Pro lesson
• Cognito user pools vs identity pools 6 min read Pro lesson
• KMS: keys, grants, envelope encryption, key policies 6 min read Pro lesson
• Secrets Manager vs SSM Parameter Store 6 min read Pro lesson

Module 4: Networking

Networking - 16 topics.

• VPC fundamentals: CIDR, subnets, route tables 6 min read Pro lesson
• Internet Gateway, NAT Gateway, NAT instance, egress-only IGW 6 min read Pro lesson
• Security Groups vs Network ACLs 6 min read Pro lesson
• VPC Endpoints: Gateway, Interface, and PrivateLink 6 min read Pro lesson
• VPC Peering and its transitivity limits 5 min read Pro lesson
• Transit Gateway and hub-and-spoke topology 6 min read Pro lesson
• Direct Connect 6 min read Pro lesson
• Site-to-Site VPN and Client VPN 5 min read Pro lesson
• VPC Flow Logs and network troubleshooting 6 min read Pro lesson
• Route 53: hosted zones, record types, health checks 7 min read Pro lesson
• Route 53 routing policies 6 min read Pro lesson
• Elastic Load Balancing: ALB vs NLB vs GWLB 7 min read Pro lesson
• Target groups, health checks, and connection draining 6 min read Pro lesson
• CloudFront 6 min read Pro lesson
• Global Accelerator vs CloudFront 5 min read Pro lesson
• IPv6 on AWS and dual-stack migration 6 min read Pro lesson

Module 5: Compute

Compute - 15 topics.

• EC2 instance families and how to choose one 6 min read Pro lesson
• Purchase options: On-Demand, Reserved, Savings Plans, Spot, Dedicated 6 min read Pro lesson
• Spot instances: interruption handling and safe workloads 6 min read Pro lesson
• AMIs, snapshots, and golden-image pipelines 6 min read Pro lesson
• User data, IMDSv2, and instance roles 6 min read Pro lesson
• Auto Scaling Groups: policies, warm pools, lifecycle hooks 6 min read Pro lesson
• Placement groups 6 min read Pro lesson
• Lambda execution model: invocation, cold start, lifecycle 6 min read Pro lesson
• Lambda concurrency: reserved, provisioned, throttling 5 min read Pro lesson
• Lambda packaging: layers, container images, SnapStart 6 min read Pro lesson
• Lambda in a VPC - and when not to 6 min read Pro lesson
• ECS: task definitions, services, EC2 vs Fargate 6 min read Pro lesson
• EKS: control plane, node groups, IRSA, Karpenter 6 min read Pro lesson
• App Runner, Elastic Beanstalk, and Lightsail 6 min read Pro lesson
• AWS Batch 5 min read Pro lesson

Module 6: Storage

Storage - 12 topics.

• S3 object model: buckets, keys, prefixes 5 min read Pro lesson
• S3 storage classes and lifecycle policies 6 min read Pro lesson
• S3 versioning, MFA delete, and Object Lock 6 min read Pro lesson
• The S3 consistency model 6 min read Pro lesson
• S3 replication: CRR, SRR, and RTC 7 min read Pro lesson
• S3 access control 7 min read Pro lesson
• S3 performance 6 min read Pro lesson
• S3 event notifications and EventBridge 5 min read Pro lesson
• EBS volume types and the IOPS/throughput model 6 min read Pro lesson
• EFS: performance modes, throughput modes, mount targets 6 min read Pro lesson
• FSx family 6 min read Pro lesson
• AWS Backup, Storage Gateway, and Snow family 6 min read Pro lesson

Module 7: Databases

Databases - 15 topics.

• Choosing a database on AWS - the decision tree 6 min read Pro lesson
• RDS: engines, Multi-AZ vs read replicas, failover behaviour 6 min read Pro lesson
• RDS Proxy and connection pooling 6 min read Pro lesson
• Aurora architecture: the shared storage layer 6 min read Pro lesson
• Aurora Serverless v2, Global Database, and cloning 6 min read Pro lesson
• DynamoDB: partitions, partition keys, and hot key problems 6 min read Pro lesson
• DynamoDB single-table design 6 min read Pro lesson
• DynamoDB GSI vs LSI 6 min read Pro lesson
• DynamoDB capacity modes, autoscaling, adaptive capacity 6 min read Pro lesson
• DynamoDB Streams, TTL, and transactions 5 min read Pro lesson
• DynamoDB Global Tables and multi-region conflict resolution 6 min read Pro lesson
• ElastiCache: Redis/Valkey vs Memcached, cluster mode 6 min read Pro lesson
• MemoryDB, DocumentDB, Neptune, Keyspaces, Timestream 6 min read Pro lesson
• Redshift: architecture, distribution styles, sort keys 6 min read Pro lesson
• DMS and the Schema Conversion Tool 6 min read Pro lesson

Module 8: Application Integration & Messaging

Application Integration & Messaging - 12 topics.

• SQS: standard vs FIFO, visibility timeout, long polling 6 min read Pro lesson
• SQS dead-letter queues and poison-message handling 5 min read Pro lesson
• SNS: topics, fan-out, filter policies, FIFO topics 5 min read Pro lesson
• EventBridge: buses, rules, patterns, schema registry 5 min read Pro lesson
• EventBridge Pipes and Scheduler 5 min read Pro lesson
• Step Functions: standard vs express, state types, error handling 6 min read Pro lesson
• Kinesis Data Streams 6 min read Pro lesson
• Kinesis Data Firehose 5 min read Pro lesson
• Amazon MSK and self-managed Kafka on AWS 6 min read Pro lesson
• Amazon MQ 5 min read Pro lesson
• API Gateway: REST vs HTTP vs WebSocket APIs 6 min read Pro lesson
• AppSync and GraphQL on AWS 5 min read Pro lesson

Module 9: Observability & Operations

Observability & Operations - 12 topics.

• CloudWatch metrics: namespaces, dimensions, custom metrics 5 min read Pro lesson
• CloudWatch Logs: log groups, retention, subscription filters 5 min read Pro lesson
• CloudWatch Logs Insights query language 5 min read Pro lesson
• CloudWatch Alarms, composite alarms, anomaly detection 6 min read Pro lesson
• CloudWatch Synthetics and RUM 5 min read Pro lesson
• AWS X-Ray and distributed tracing 5 min read Pro lesson
• OpenTelemetry on AWS (ADOT) 6 min read Pro lesson
• CloudTrail: management vs data events, Lake, organisation trails 6 min read Pro lesson
• AWS Config: rules, conformance packs, remediation 5 min read Pro lesson
• Systems Manager: Session Manager, Patch Manager, Run Command, Automation 6 min read Pro lesson
• AWS Health, Trusted Advisor, Compute Optimizer 6 min read Pro lesson
• OpenSearch Service for log analytics 6 min read Pro lesson

Module 10: Infrastructure as Code & Deployment

Infrastructure as Code & Deployment - 13 topics.

• CloudFormation: templates, stacks, change sets, drift 5 min read Pro lesson
• CloudFormation advanced: nested stacks, StackSets, custom resources 5 min read Pro lesson
• AWS CDK: constructs, synthesis, and when CDK beats raw CloudFormation 6 min read Pro lesson
• Terraform on AWS: provider, state management, workspaces 6 min read Pro lesson
• AWS SAM and serverless deployment 6 min read Pro lesson
• CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy 5 min read Pro lesson
• CodeCatalyst and CodeArtifact 5 min read Pro lesson
• ECR: repositories, lifecycle policies, image scanning 6 min read Pro lesson
• Deployment strategies: rolling, blue/green, canary, linear 6 min read Pro lesson
• Blue/green mechanics on ECS, EKS, Lambda, and EC2 6 min read Pro lesson
• Feature flags and AppConfig 7 min read Pro lesson
• GitHub Actions with AWS OIDC 6 min read Pro lesson
• Multi-account CI/CD topology 6 min read Pro lesson

Module 11: Security, Governance & Compliance

Security, Governance & Compliance - 14 topics.

• Encryption at rest patterns across services 10 min read Pro lesson
• Encryption in transit, ACM, and certificate lifecycle 8 min read Pro lesson
• GuardDuty: finding types and triage 9 min read Pro lesson
• Security Hub and standards aggregation 9 min read Pro lesson
• Amazon Inspector 9 min read Pro lesson
• Amazon Macie 9 min read Pro lesson
• AWS WAF: rules, rule groups, rate limiting, managed rules 9 min read Pro lesson
• AWS Shield Standard vs Advanced and DDoS response 9 min read Pro lesson
• Network Firewall and DNS Firewall 8 min read Pro lesson
• Amazon Detective 9 min read Pro lesson
• Control Tower, Landing Zone, and account vending 8 min read Pro lesson
• Incident response: the credential compromise runbook 11 min read Pro lesson
• Compliance programs, Artifact, and Audit Manager 8 min read Pro lesson
• Data residency and cross-border constraints 9 min read Pro lesson

Module 12: Data & Analytics

Data & Analytics - 11 topics.

• The AWS data lake reference architecture 10 min read Pro lesson
• AWS Glue: crawlers, catalog, ETL jobs, Glue Studio 9 min read Pro lesson
• Athena: partitioning, file formats, cost per query 9 min read Pro lesson
• Lake Formation and fine-grained data permissions 9 min read Pro lesson
• Apache Iceberg on S3 9 min read Pro lesson
• EMR: Spark on AWS and EMR Serverless 9 min read Pro lesson
• Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink 8 min read Pro lesson
• Redshift: Spectrum, materialised views, workload management 9 min read Pro lesson
• QuickSight 9 min read Pro lesson
• Streaming vs batch - the decision framework 9 min read Pro lesson
• Data quality, lineage, and cataloguing 10 min read Pro lesson

Module 13: AI/ML Services

AI/ML Services - 9 topics.

• Amazon Bedrock: models, invocation, provisioned throughput 9 min read Pro lesson
• Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Agents, and Guardrails 9 min read Pro lesson
• SageMaker: notebooks, training jobs, endpoints 9 min read Pro lesson
• SageMaker Pipelines, Model Registry, Feature Store 9 min read Pro lesson
• SageMaker inference options: real-time, async, serverless, batch 9 min read Pro lesson
• Vector search on AWS: OpenSearch, Aurora pgvector, Kendra 10 min read Pro lesson
• AI services: Comprehend, Textract, Rekognition, Transcribe, Polly, Translate 8 min read Pro lesson
• Amazon Q Developer and Q Business 8 min read Pro lesson
• Cost and latency profile of AWS AI services 10 min read Pro lesson

Module 14: Cost, FinOps & Optimisation

Cost, FinOps & Optimisation - 9 topics.

• The AWS bill: how charges are actually generated 9 min read Pro lesson
• Cost Explorer, Budgets, and Cost Anomaly Detection 8 min read Pro lesson
• The Cost and Usage Report - querying it with Athena 9 min read Pro lesson
• Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances - the real decision 9 min read Pro lesson
• Tagging strategy and cost allocation 8 min read Pro lesson
• Right-sizing with Compute Optimizer 9 min read Pro lesson
• Data transfer costs - the hidden line item 8 min read Pro lesson
• Storage cost optimisation: lifecycle, Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier retrieval 9 min read Pro lesson
• Serverless cost modelling - when Lambda gets expensive 9 min read Pro lesson

Module 15: Migration & Hybrid

Migration & Hybrid - 6 topics.

• Migration strategies: the seven Rs 9 min read Pro lesson
• Application Migration Service 8 min read Pro lesson
• DataSync and the Snow family 9 min read Pro lesson
• Outposts, ECS Anywhere, EKS Anywhere 9 min read Pro lesson
• Database migration patterns 8 min read Pro lesson
• Hybrid networking and identity 9 min read Pro lesson

Browse all courses