Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an easy-to-use, reliable, scalable and highly reliable infrastructure platform that is hosted on the cloud. AWS is flexible across operating systems, programming languages, web application platforms, databases, and other services. Many companies are moving away from traditional servers hosted in internally-controlled data centers and moving towards cloud infrastructure hosted by a third party. AWS has emerged as one of the leaders in this space. AWS training is valuable because it provides a broad overview of many different areas that an IT person may encounter in their career. AWS’s approach to networking, security, and data storage is pretty standard, which will provide a good platform to build knowledge and skills.
The AWS Essentials training was geared towards users who had never used AWS before, and therefore it was a much easier to follow training than the LPI Linux Essentials. The training began with the basics of setting up an account, how to navigate the console, create billing alarms, and where to find documentation for AWS. The training then moved on to Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM in AWS is similar to many other identity management tools, or tools with identity management built into the product. Since I already have experience with identity management tools, groups, policies, roles, etc., IAM was intuitive and easy to learn through these videos. It might have been more confusing for someone less familiar with identity management, but I found the videos easy to follow. There was also a hands-on lab to practice what was taught in the videos.
The next portion of the AWS Essentials training then discussed network services and connectivity. There was a brief overview of network services and the AWS global infrastructure, then there was a section on how the virtual private cloud (VPC) worked, including internet gateways, rout tables, network access control lists, subnets, and availability zones. Then there was a training on Elastic Cloud Compute, known as EC2, which provided an overview of Amazon Machine Images, Instance types, Elastic Block Storage, Security Groups, IP Addressing, Launching and using an EC2 Instance, and how to connect to an EC2 instance from a Windows PC. Each of these sections had a quiz and provided a hands-on lab.
The training then moved on to storage services, which AWS refers to as S3. The training discussed buckets and objects, storage classes, object lifecycles, permission, and object versioning. S3 can hold virtually any type of file, and it allows for versioning so that previous versions of any changes can be preserved, retrieved and restored.
AWS allows the use both SQL and NoSQL databases, specifically RDS and DynamoDB respectively. AWS also has a built in monitoring system known as the simple notification service (SNS). SNS can monitor the system and let the administrator know when there are issues such as a full CPU or if a service is down. AWS also has management tools called CloudWatch and CloudTrail.
AWS has options for load balancing, elasticity, and scalability. The load balancer that AWS uses is called the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and allows a user to filter traffic to the least busy instance in order to prevent an overload. It works the same as a most server load balancers.
AWS uses autoscaling to ensure the correct number of EC2 instances are available to handle the application's load. This is free, but the user is responsible for paying for any AWS resources that autoscaling uses. AWS also has its own DNS service, known as Route 53, which can be used to register domains and configure DNS services. Finally, AWS supports Lambda to run different code.
Overall, the AWS training was more geared towards gaining a general overview of the AWS system and its various components. It was reasonably paced and provided good quizzes and hands-on labs to better understand how the system works. AWS is pretty user friendly and self-explanatory.