Building on AWS

What you will be able to do

• You will be able to choose between EC2, Lambda, and containers for a given workload and defend the pick on cost, control, and operational effort.
• You will be able to launch and scale EC2 workloads using amazon machine images, instance types, and auto scaling groups behind a load balancer.
• You will be able to run event-driven and containerized workloads with Lambda, ECS, and EKS on Fargate, and explain when serverless beats managing your own servers.
• You will be able to design a VPC from the address space up, planning CIDR ranges and splitting public and private subnets across availability zones for resilience.
• You will be able to control traffic in and out of a VPC using route tables, internet and NAT gateways, security groups, and network ACLs.
• You will be able to match a workload to the right storage service across object (S3), block (EBS), and file (EFS), using lifecycle and tiering to control cost.
• You will be able to select between relational and NoSQL databases with RDS, Aurora, and DynamoDB, and defend the trade-off on scale, consistency, and access pattern.
• You will be able to define a full AWS stack as code in CloudFormation and deploy it safely with change sets, parameters, and reusable nested stacks.

What is inside

4 modules, 8 lessons. Each module ends in a graded quiz and most carry an assignment.

1. 01

   Compute on AWS: EC2, Lambda, and Containers

   Every workload needs somewhere to run, and AWS offers three very different ways to provide it. This module teaches you to place a workload on virtual machines with EC2, on serverless functions with Lambda, or in containers with ECS, EKS, and Fargate, then scale it under load. You will finish able to defend each choice on cost, control, and how much operational work you are willing to own.

   2 lessons · 5 quiz questions

2. 02

   Designing the VPC

   A VPC is the private, isolated network that every other AWS resource you build will sit inside, and its layout is what separates a secure environment from an exposed one. This module takes you from an empty Region to a deliberate network design: planning a non-overlapping address space with CIDR, carving public and private subnets across Availability Zones for high availability, and then controlling every path in and out with route tables, gateways, security groups, and network ACLs. You finish able to design a multi-tier VPC that is reachable where it must be and closed everywhere else.

   2 lessons · 5 quiz questions · assignment

3. 03

   Storage and Databases

   Data is the heart of every solution, and this module teaches you to place it well on AWS. You will match workloads to object, block, or file storage using Amazon S3, EBS, and EFS, then choose between relational and NoSQL databases with RDS, Aurora, and DynamoDB. Every choice is defended on scale, cost, durability, and how the application actually reads and writes.

   2 lessons · 5 quiz questions

4. 04

   Infrastructure as Code with CloudFormation

   Clicking through the console does not scale and cannot be reviewed, so AWS engineers define their environments in code. In this module you describe a full stack in a CloudFormation template, deploy and update it safely with change sets, and make it reusable with parameters, mappings, conditions, outputs, and nested stacks. By the end you can rebuild an entire environment from one template on demand.

   2 lessons · 5 quiz questions · assignment