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AWS Fundamentals Tutorial

Learn the core of AWS: IAM, EC2 and VPC, S3, RDS and Lambda, plus habits that keep your bill small

Beginner4 lessonsabout 21 min of reading

This course is for people who are new to Amazon Web Services and want a clear mental model before they click around the console: who is allowed to do what, where servers and databases live, how storage works and how to keep the bill under control. No cloud experience is required; basic comfort with a terminal helps. If cloud computing itself is new to you, read Cloud Computing Fundamentals first.

Each lesson takes one slice of AWS and gives it a concrete example: a photo club's archive for IAM, a bike shop's booking site for EC2 and VPC, a podcast's audio library for S3, and a ferry-booking backend for RDS, Lambda and cost control. You will read and write IAM policies, reason about subnets and security groups, choose S3 storage classes, and test a Lambda handler locally.

A note on verification: AWS services cannot be run inside this course's authoring environment, so the CLI commands are written from the documented syntax and are not shown with real output. Account IDs, ARNs and resource names are placeholders such as 123456789012, and sample outputs are labelled illustrative. The Python Lambda handler was run locally and its output is real.

Start lesson 1: AWS FundamentalsRide it: tricks, quizzes, XP

AWS Fundamentals lessons

  1. 1AWS Fundamentals: Accounts, IAM Users, Roles and Least PrivilegeAWS fundamentals for beginners: protect the root user, understand IAM users, roles and policies, and write a least-privilege policy and role for a program.5 min read
  2. 2AWS EC2 and VPC Basics: Instances, Subnets and Security GroupsAWS EC2 and VPC basics: how instances, public and private subnets, route tables and security groups fit together, with CLI commands to launch a server.5 min read
  3. 3AWS S3 Fundamentals: Storage Classes, Permissions and Static HostingAWS S3 fundamentals: buckets and keys, storage classes and lifecycle rules, permission layers, presigned URLs and hosting a static website the safe way.5 min read
  4. 4AWS RDS, Lambda and Cost Control: A Backend in One PictureRDS and Lambda in one backend picture: a managed database versus per-request functions, a testable handler, plus budget alerts and teardown habits.6 min read

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