Introduction to AWS

Introduction to AWS

Amazon Web Services began with web-service infrastructure in the early 2000s and has grown into a broad public cloud platform. Instead of buying fixed hardware, teams provision compute, storage, databases, networks, analytics, security, and AI capabilities through APIs and pay for measured usage.

Core ideas

• A Region is a separate geographic area; select it from latency, residency, service availability, resilience, and cost requirements.
• Availability Zones are isolated locations within a Region. Multi-AZ design protects against a single-zone failure.
• Most resources live in an account and Region, while services such as IAM have global characteristics.
• The shared-responsibility model changes by service: AWS operates cloud infrastructure; customers govern identities, data, configuration, and workload code.

Design and operating model

Start with an AWS Organization and separate accounts for production, non-production, security, and log archives. Choose Regions deliberately, establish identity federation and budgets, then deploy resources through infrastructure as code. The Console is useful for learning, but repeatable environments need versioned automation.

Example

aws sts get-caller-identity
aws configure list
aws ec2 describe-regions \
  --query 'Regions[].RegionName' \
  --output table

Run examples in a disposable training account and replace Regions, identifiers, policies, resource sizes, and names with reviewed values. Verify commands with the current AWS CLI and service documentation before production use.

Production guidance

• Never use the root user for routine work; protect it with MFA and no access keys.
• Tag resources with owner, environment, application, and cost-center metadata.
• Design reliability, security, operations, performance, cost, and sustainability together using Well-Architected guidance.

The chapter quiz follows the lesson and checks both service vocabulary and architecture decisions.