AWS is the largest cloud provider. To be a DevOps engineer, you must understand its three "Core" services: EC2 (Compute), S3 (Storage), and VPC (Networking).
1. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
EC2 provides scalable virtual servers.
List Running Instances
Action:
aws ec2 describe-instances --filters "Name=instance-state-name,Values=running" --query "Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId,InstanceType,PublicIpAddress]" --output tableResult:
------------------------------------------------------------------
| DescribeInstances |
+----------------------+---------------+-------------------------+
| i-0a1234567890abcdef| t3.medium | 203.0.113.42 |
| i-0b9876543210fedcb | t2.micro | 54.12.34.56 |
+----------------------+---------------+-------------------------+2. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
S3 is an object storage service used for backups, static websites, and data lakes.
List Buckets and Files
Action:
# List all buckets
aws s3 ls
# List files in a specific bucket
aws s3 ls s3://my-devops-backups/Result:
2026-04-10 12:00:00 production-db-backup.sql
2026-04-10 12:05:00 logs-archive.tar.gz3. Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
A VPC is your own private network in the AWS cloud. It allows you to isolate your resources.
Core VPC Components:
- Subnets: Ranges of IP addresses in your VPC.
- Internet Gateway: Allows communication between your VPC and the internet.
- Route Tables: Rules that determine where network traffic is directed.
- Security Groups: Virtual firewalls for your EC2 instances.
Check VPCs
Action:
aws ec2 describe-vpcs --query "Vpcs[*].[VpcId,CidrBlock,IsDefault]" --output tableResult:
-------------------------------------------
| DescribeVpcs |
+-----------------------+-----------------+
| vpc-0a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8| 10.0.0.0/16 |
+-----------------------+-----------------+Summary
- EC2: Virtual servers (Compute).
- S3: Object storage (Backups/Data).
- VPC: Isolated private network (Networking).
- AWS CLI: The most powerful way to manage these resources from a pipeline.