My notes on the AWS Cloud Technical Essentials course on Coursera.

Week 1 - Getting Started with AWS Cloud

4-Week course content

  • Week 1: Getting Started with AWS Cloud
    • Introduction to AWS Cloud
    • AWS Global Infrastructure including AWS Regions and Availability Zones
    • Different ways to interact with AWS
    • Using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  • Week 2: AWS Compute and Networking Services
    • Introduction to AWS Compute and Networking Services
    • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
    • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
    • Elastic Load Balancing
    • AWS Auto Scaling
  • Week 3: Store and Databases on AWS
    • Important concepts such as buckets, objects for Amazon S3
    • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
    • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
    • Amazon DynamoDB
    • Amazon Redshift
  • Week 4: Monitoring, Optimizing, and Going Serverless
    • Amazon CloudWatch
    • AWS Trusted Advisor
    • AWS CloudFormation
    • AWS Lambda
    • Amazon API Gateway

Link to Course Roadmap

Back story: How AWS was born?

Refer to the story from Fortune

The best-known origin story of AWS is that it started when Amazon had some spare computer capacity and decided to rent it out to other companies. But the real story of the began with Amazon’s innovative responses to two problems.

  • In early 2000s, Amazon—still known mainly as an online bookseller—had built from scratch one of the world’s biggest websites, but adding new features had become frustratingly slow. Software engineering teams were spending 70% of their time building the basic elements any project would require—most important, a storage system and an appropriate computing infrastructure. However, every project team was performing the same drudgery. In response, Selipsky recalls, company leaders began to think, “Let’s build a shared layer of infrastructure services that all these teams can rely on, and none of them have to spend time on general capabilities like storage, compute capabilities, databases.”
  • In 2002 Amazon offered other website owners a more advanced piece of software, enabling them to create far more creative displays links to Amazon products. Surprisingly, when Amazon launched a fuller, free version of the software building block, A lot of the downloads were going to Amazon’s own software engineers. Developers everywhere, not only its own, were starving for new tools that did just that. “We very quickly figured out that external developers had exactly the same problems as internal developers at Amazon,”

Some interesting picked up from the story:

  • The world saw Amazon as an online retailer, but the company’s leaders never thought of it that way. They thought of it as “a technology company that had simply applied its technology to the retail space first,” said by Andy Jassy the first CEO of AWS.
  • Jassy’s job was to build a team and develop AWS. He wrote a proposal for it as a cloud-computing business. The document, one of the famous six-pagers used at Amazon’s executive meetings instead of PowerPoint (which is banned), reportedly went through 31 revisions.
  • “This is the greatest piece of business luck in the history of business so far as I know. We faced no like-minded competition for seven years. I think the big established enterprise software companies did not see Amazon as a credible enterprise software company, so we had this incredible runway.” or “A business miracle happened,” Bezos said.
  • What might be the next industry to get Amazon’s AWS-style mega-venture treatment? The leading candidate is health care.

Why Cloud Computing?

  • Cost Savings: No upfront capital investment, pay only for what you use.
  • Agility: Quickly deploy resources and scale up or down as needed.
  • Elasticity: Scale up or down based on demand.
  • Flexibility: Choose the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services you need.
  • Security: AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud. You are responsible for securing the data that you put into the cloud and for configuring the security groups provided by AWS.
  • Global Reach: AWS has the global infrastructure to support your application wherever you are.
  • Productivity: Focus on your application, not the infrastructure.
  • Innovation: AWS provides a broad set of services that can help you drive innovation.

AWS Global Infrastructure

  • Availability Zones: Distinct locations within a region that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region. Each Availability Zone has redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities.
  • Regions: A region is a physical location in the world where we have multiple Availability Zones. Each AWS Region is a separate geographic area. Each AWS Region has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones.
  • Edge Locations: Edge locations are endpoints for AWS which are used for caching content. Typically, this consists of CloudFront, Amazon’s content delivery network (CDN). Example: If your website is hosted in the US but many of your users are in Europe, you can use a CDN to cache your website in multiple locations around Europe. This will reduce latency when users access your website.

Factors to consider when choosing a region:

  • Compliance: Ensure that the region you choose complies with any data sovereignty requirements. For example, if you have data that must remain in the EU, you should choose a region in the EU.
  • Latency: Choose a region that is close to your users to reduce latency.
  • Pricing: Prices can vary between regions. Check the pricing for the services you plan to use in the regions you are considering.
  • Service Availability: Not all services are available in all regions. Check the service availability in the regions you are considering.

Interacting with AWS