Amazon Web Services

The leading cloud platform — core services to architecture

Category: Cloud

Learning Path: What → Why → Architecture → Setup → Real Examples → Production → Interview Prep

What is Amazon Web Services?

AWS has 30+ regions worldwide, each with 2-6 AZs. Always design for AZ failure — multi-AZ is the baseline for production. Shared Responsibility: AWS secures the cloud, you secure what's IN the cloud.

Why Amazon Web Services?

IAM is the security foundation. Use Roles, not Users for applications. IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts) lets K8s pods assume AWS roles without access keys. SCPs control what accounts can do at the organization level.

Learning Modules

Module 01 — AWS Fundamentals

Regions, AZs, global infrastructure

Topics covered:

•Regions and Availability Zones — 🟢 Beginner

•Shared Responsibility Model — 🟢 Beginner

•AWS pricing model — 🟢 Beginner

Module 02 — IAM

Identity and access management

Topics covered:

•Users, Groups, Roles, Policies — 🟢 Beginner

•Least privilege principle — 🟡 Intermediate

•IAM Roles for EC2/EKS (IRSA) — 🟡 Intermediate

•SCP and Organizations — 🔴 Advanced

Module 03 — Compute

EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS

EC2 is VMs. EKS is managed Kubernetes. ECS is AWS's own container orchestration. Lambda for event-driven serverless. For new workloads: prefer EKS (if K8s expertise) or Fargate (serverless containers) over raw EC2.

Topics covered:

•EC2 instance families and pricing — 🟢 Beginner

•Auto Scaling Groups — 🟡 Intermediate

•EKS (managed Kubernetes) — 🔴 Advanced

•ECS and Fargate — 🟡 Intermediate

•Lambda and serverless — 🟡 Intermediate

Module 04 — Networking

VPC, Route53, Load Balancers

VPC is your private network in AWS. Public subnets have IGW route. Private subnets go through NAT GW. Security Groups are stateful instance firewalls. NACLs are stateless subnet firewalls. Transit Gateway connects multiple VPCs and on-prem.

Topics covered:

•VPC, subnets, routing tables — 🟡 Intermediate

•Security Groups vs NACLs — 🟡 Intermediate

•NAT Gateway and Internet Gateway — 🟡 Intermediate

•Transit Gateway — 🔴 Advanced

•Route53 DNS — 🟡 Intermediate

Module 05 — Storage

S3, EBS, EFS

S3 is object storage — the most used AWS service. EBS is block storage for EC2 (like a hard drive). EFS is shared NFS filesystem for multiple instances. S3 lifecycle policies automatically move data to cheaper storage classes.

Topics covered:

•S3 storage classes and lifecycle — 🟡 Intermediate

•EBS volume types (gp3, io2) — 🟡 Intermediate

•EFS for shared file system — 🟡 Intermediate

•S3 security and bucket policies — 🔴 Advanced

Production Example

Interview Prep

!!! tip "PSR Formula"

Answer every question: Problem → Solution → Result. 45-90 seconds max.