AWS
Basics
A Beginner’s Guide
Table of Contents
Introduction to AWS 01
Understanding AWS 03
A quick primer on AWS services 05
AWS use cases 07
AWS key terminologies 08
Skills required to become an AWS
professional 11
Trusted AWS learning resources 13
INTRODUCTION
TO AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud-service platform from
the e-commerce giant, Amamzon.com Inc (AMZN). It offers diverse
functionalities, including compute power, database storage, and
content delivery, to help businesses scale and
grow efficiently.
Generating 35.03 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 net sales, AWS ranks
as one of the most popular public cloud infrastructure and platform
services that dominate public cloud adoption worldwide.
According to many, “cloud” is no longer a tool, but a way of life today.
Advantages like lower operating costs, enhanced collaboration, and
increased flexibility have pushed companies across industries and
geographies to switch to cloud computing. According to a study,
most companies are likely to shift to Cloud-only or Cloud-first policies
by the end of this year.
Leading the $100 billion global cloud market and generating twice
as revenue as its closest rival, AWS controls more than a third of the
cloud market and recently broke the record of being a $10 billion
business in the first quarter of 2020.
With over one million global users and companies like Netflix, Twitch,
LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. featuring among the top 10 AWS users
(based on EC2 monthly spend), AWS continues to be the prime
choice of public cloud adoption for both big and small companies.
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An increase in the adoption of AWS by organizations has spiked the demand for
AWS certified professionals. With about more than 380,000 cloud computing
jobs available worldwide and about 1 million such jobs to be available in India
by 2022, a career in AWS promises to be a lucrative one.
Learning AWS basics or investing in an AWS certification training program is
key to jump-starting technical careers in the most in-demand cloud computing
services. Adequate training gives IT professionals that extra edge in terms of a
high-paying salary and a future-ready career.
This handbook will attempt to discuss some of the most essential services of
this leading cloud computing technology and scope for career advancement in
this fast-evolving and growing arena.
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UNDERSTANDING
AWS
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive and evolving
cloud computing platform that offers services in the form of
building blocks and is developed by combining infrastructure
as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged
software as a service (SaaS) offerings.
These building blocks or services are designed to collaborate and
create and deploy sophisticated and highly scalable applications
for businesses to improve their performance and productivity.
It gives firms enhanced security and storage flexibility, higher
computing capacity, easy database construction, and even
content caching, depending on where you are located.
Availability
AWS is not limited to a particular geography or time zone.
Spanning over a total of 245 countries worldwide, it offers over
175 fully-featured services from its data centers located globally
across 76 availability zones.
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Advantages
Security Elasticity and Scalability
The applications are reliable because AWS’s on-demand infrastructure
they run on a safe and secure AWS allows greater scalability to
infrastructure. businesses, allowing them to innovate
and experiment faster.
Cost-effectiveness Flexibility
These 175 cloud services are available With no rigid protocols or
on a pay-as-you-go and scalable restrictions, AWS is platform
basis. This means that you pay only agnostic to operating systems
for the services you use, and the less and languages, and provides
you use it, the less you pay. This also businesses the advantage of
means that the more you use it, the selecting a programming model or
less you pay per unit. (i.e., each unit development platform that is most
costs less with each new purchase) beneficial for them.
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A QUICK
PRIMER ON AWS
SERVICES
Made up of different cloud computing products and services,
AWS provides an organization with a range of tools like
servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile
development, and security. It also offers services in emerging
technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI),
data lakes, analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT).
For those requiring an introduction to AWS and its services, AWS
can be broken into three main products, EC2, Amazon’s virtual
machine service, Glacier, a low-cost cloud storage service, and S3,
Amazon’s storage system.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is used for scalable object
storage for internet back up, collection, and analytics. As the
cheapest storage option in the object-storage category, it allows
an IT professional to retrieve stored data from almost anywhere
whenever you need it. The other AWS services in the “storage”
domain include:
Elastic Block Store
Amazon Glacier
AWS Snowball
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AWS Data Transfer Products
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which includes Amazon
Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator, and Amazon RedShift, are the key
data migration, collection, and data transfer products that help in seamless data
collection. These products also enable AWS users to monitor and analyze data
in real-time.
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
This service provides virtual servers called EC2 instances that give AWS users
secure and resizable computing capacity based on their needs. EC2 is designed
to make web-scale cloud computing more accessible.
Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Services)
This notification tool delivers/publishes or push-sends messages to a large
number of subscribers through email or SMS.
Amazon KMS (Key Management System)
This is a security tool that uses 256-bit encryption for data security,
safeguarding it from hackers and cyber-attacks.
Amazon Lambda
This cost-effective service runs a code depending on specific events and
manages the dependent resources. It provides for a serverless compute where
payment depends on how long it takes for the AWS customer to execute the
code.
Amazon Route 53
This is a highly scalable, cloud-based Domain Name System web service that
does not require AWS users to maintain a separate DNS account. It is designed
to allow businesses to route users to internet applications in a reliable and cost-
effective method.
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AWS USE CASES
Let us take the example of how AWS services helped Unilever, a
global-scale consumer goods manufacturer, to grow its business
exponentially.
Unilever’s Challenge – Spread across 170 countries, the
company optimized its business models by testing digital
marketing campaigns in a pilot country and then deploying it
to other shores, if the pilot was successful. However, when its
previous on-premise data centers, which had different processes
and technologies, failed to deliver, Unilever planned to redesign
its infrastructure to achieve a faster time-to-market and a
standardized environment for its digital campaigns.
Goals for AWS – Unilever wanted AWS to design a technology
platform for websites with regional content delivery architecture,
which could also to migrate its existing web properties to the
cloud.
Benefits of AWS – Once Unilever migrated to AWS, using the
full range of AWS services to support it’s 1700 digital marketing
web properties, Unilever’s redesigned infrastructure was an
improved version with applications becoming more reliable and
secure, and the consumer-giant experienced:
- smooth and faster roll-outs of digital marketing campaigns
- improved operational efficiency and business agility
- openness of the AWS Cloud
- accelerated innovation
AWS Services Used – Amazon S3, EBS Snapshot Copy,
Amazon Elastic Book Store, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.
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AWS KEY
TERMINOLOGIES
As an introduction to AWS, the following terms and definitions will
help a beginner navigate the world of the leading cloud computing
technology.
AWS Internet of Things (IoT): AWS IoT is a managed cloud
service that lets connected devices interact with cloud applications
and other devices easily and in a secure manner.
Certificate Manager (ACM): ACM lets AWS customers to
easily manage, provision, and deploy public Secure Sockets Layer/
Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for their AWS
based websites and applications.
Cloud Formation: This lets users create and update a collection
of related AWS resources in a simple and predictable way.
Cloud Front: It is a fast content delivery network (CDN) that
securely distributes content to end-users with low latency and high
data transfer speeds.
Cloud Search: This is a cost-effective, scalable, and fully
managed search solution service for websites and apps.
Cloud Trail: It is a web-based, auditing, compliance monitoring,
and governance tool that provides increased visibility into user
activity by recording API activity made on user-account.
Data Pipeline: This is a lightweight orchestrated service for
periodic, data-driven workflows. It enables reliable processing and
movement of data between AWS compute and storage services and
on-premises data sources.
Database Migration Service: AWS DMS helps users in
databases migration to the cloud, easily and securely while
minimizing downtime.
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DynamoDB: It is a scalable NoSQL EMR: Amazon Elastic MapReduce
data store that manages distributed is a tool that enables big data tasks
replicas of data to make it highly such as web indexing, data mining,
available. and log file analysis.
EC2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Glacier: A cost-effective storage
(EC2) provides need-based, resizable service that provides secure and
compute capacity in the cloud. durable storage for data archiving
and backup.
EC2 Container Service: Amazon
ECS allows users to easily operate IAM: AWS Identity and Access
and manage Docker containers across Management (IAM) enables AWS
a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. users to securely control access to
AWS services and resources and
Elastic Beanstalk: AWS Elastic manage user and user permissions
Beanstalk is an easy-to-use with the AWS environment.
application container for deploying
and managing web applications. Inspector: Amazon Inspector is
an automated security assessment
ElastiCache: A widely popular service that enables customers
choice for real-time use cases to analyze the behavior of the
like real-time analytics, caching, applications and helps to identify
gaming, session stores, geospatial potential security issues
services, and queuing, this improves
application performance by allowing Kinesis: Amazon Kinesis services
users to retrieve information from an make it easy to work with real-time
in-memory caching system. data streaming in the AWS cloud.
Elastic File System: Amazon Lambda: AWS Lambda is a compute
Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) service that runs a user-generated
is a file storage service for Amazon code in response to events and
Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) automatically manages the compute-
instances. resources for the user.
Elasticsearch Service: This AWS Machine Learning: Amazon
managed service is a popular open- Machine Learning allows users to
source search and analytics engine build smart applications easily.
that makes it easy to deploy, operate,
and scale Elasticsearch. OpsWorks: AWS OpsWorks is
a DevOps platform that manages
Elastic Transcoder: This allows applications of any scale or
easy, scalable, and low-cost complexity on the AWS cloud.
conversion of media files in the cloud.
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RDS: Amazon Relational Database Storage Gateway: AWS Storage
Service (RDS) makes it easy to set up, Gateway is a system that securely
operate, and scale familiar relational integrates an organization’s on-
databases in the AWS cloud. premises IT environments with AWS
cloud storage infrastructure for
Redshift: Amazon Redshift is a fast, backup and disaster recovery.
fully managed, petabyte-scale data
warehouse that allows easy data Amazon Simple Queue Service
analysis using the customer’s existing (SQS): A reliable and highly scalable
business intelligence (BI) tools. hosted queue for storing messages as
they travel between computers
Route 53: Amazon Route 53 is a
scalable and highly available Domain SWF: Amazon Simple Workflow
Name System (DNS) and Domain (SWF) coordinates all of the parallel
Name Registration service. or sequential processing steps within
an application.
SES: Amazon Simple Email Service
(SES) enables customers to send and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
receive emails. (VPC): Allows users to launch AWS
resources in a private, isolated cloud.
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SKILLS
REQUIRED TO
BECOME AN AWS
PROFESSIONAL
Here is a list of few skills that an aspiring AWS professional needs
to pick up before stepping afoot in this industry.
Data storage skills –
Knowledge in bucket storage using AWS S3, AWS RDS, all the
way to full-fledged Hadoop clusters will help in landing an AWS
architect’s job with ease
Programming Skills –
An AWS architect should be able to write code in Java, Python
or C+ or any other programming languages that have an official
AWS SDK
Networking Skills –
An AWS architect or developer has to be familiar with and
understand networking terms like HTTP, VPN, DNS, CDN, and
TCP/IP. Also, knowledge in services such as Route 53 (DNS),
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and CloudFront (CDN) that are used
to design cloud networking, using public and private subnets, VPC
peering, internet access and, is expected of an AWS professional.
Information Security –
AWS is a highly secured environment with services and guidelines
in place to make sure that only authorized persons are allowed
to perform specific tasks. Knowledge in IAM and how to secure
networks using Security Groups and Access Control Lists are
prerequisite skillsets for an AWS expert.
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AWS Service Selection –
Basic services every AWS architect should have knowledge in include SQS
(simple queuing), RDS (Relational Database Service), and SNS (notifications).
Knowledge of AWS IoT related services can be helpful too.
Cloud Specific Technologies –
In order to properly design workloads and harness AWS infrastructure in
an optimum manner to be able to make scalable and available applications,
knowledge about several AWS core services like AWS Lambda, EC2, S3, VPC,
ELB, etc. is a must.
Other Skills include:
Experience working with automation tools like Chef/Puppet.
Familiarity working with CI tools like Jenkins.
Good knowledge of code deployment
Build and release management across multiple environments and
infrastructure
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TRUSTED AWS
LEARNING
RESOURCES
Earning an AWS certification is the best route to take to embark
on a flourishing AWS career. The AWS certification has been
available since 2013, and the best way to achieve an AWS
certification is to learn through an AWS course that offers a mix of
theory and hands-on experience.
Simplilearn’s AWS Certification Courses can help you prepare for
AWS exams, and let you be successful in earning your valuable
AWS Certification too. As an AWS select technology partner, our
AWS courses are aligned with the latest AWS exams featuring
Amazon designed best practices.
You can choose any one from the role-based certifications in
Cloud Practitioner, Architect, Developer, and Operations roles.
Our learning path for the top-paying and high-in-demand AWS
certificate courses include:
- AWS Solutions Architect Certification Training Course
- AWS Developer Associate Certificate Training Course
And our fundamental AWS certification course is:
- AWS Technical Essentials Certification Training course
All Simplilearn AWS Certification courses contain current, and
relevant course material, access to integrated labs, live demos and
real-time industry projects to help you pass these AWS exams.
We are here to assist you with our 24/7 teaching assistance,
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applied projects, and online videos. Our AWS training is conducted through
self-paced live streaming that facilitates networking with a global audience and
encourages live interactions, discussions, and questions and answers sessions
with industry-expert instructors.
Find our AWS Solutions Architect Online Classroom training classes in top cities,
here and our AWS Developer Associate Online Classroom training classes in top
cities here.
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