G
GuideDevOps
Lesson 3 of 12

AWS Overview & Core Services

Part of the Cloud Computing tutorial series.

Why AWS?

Market Leader:

  • 32% cloud market share
  • 200+ fully featured services
  • Used by Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Slack, Spotify
  • Most mature cloud platform
  • Largest community and resources

AWS Global Infrastructure

Regions

Geographic locations (31 regions worldwide):

  • us-east-1 (N. Virginia) - largest, most services
  • eu-west-1 (Ireland)
  • ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo)
  • ap-southeast-1 (Singapore)

Availability Zones

Each region has 3+ isolated data centers

# List all regions
aws ec2 describe-regions --query 'Regions[*].[RegionName,RegionEndpoint]' --output table

AWS Core Services

Compute

EC2 - Virtual machines

aws ec2 describe-instance-types --query 'InstanceTypes[*].InstanceType' | head

Lambda - Serverless functions

aws lambda create-function --function-name my-func --runtime python3.9

ECS/EKS - Container orchestration

aws ecs run-task --cluster my-cluster --task-definition my-task

Storage

S3 - Object storage

aws s3 mb s3://my-bucket
aws s3 cp myfile.txt s3://my-bucket/

EBS - Block storage

aws ec2 create-volume --size 100 --availability-zone us-east-1a

EFS - Network filesystem

aws efs create-file-system --performance-mode generalPurpose

Database

RDS - Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle

aws rds create-db-instance --db-instance-identifier mydb --db-instance-class db.t2.micro --engine postgres

DynamoDB - NoSQL database

aws dynamodb create-table --table-name Users --attribute-definitions AttributeName=UserID,AttributeType=S

ElastiCache - Redis/Memcached

aws elasticache create-cache-cluster --cache-cluster-id my-cache --engine redis

Networking

VPC - Your private network

aws ec2 create-vpc --cidr-block 10.0.0.0/16

ELB/ALB - Load balancing

aws elbv2 create-load-balancer --name my-alb --subnets subnet-123 subnet-456

CloudFront - CDN

aws cloudfront create-distribution --distribution-config file://config.json

Monitoring

CloudWatch - Metrics, logs, alarms

aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics --namespace AWS/EC2 --metric-name CPUUtilization

CloudTrail - API audit logs

aws cloudtrail create-trail --name my-trail --s3-bucket-name audit-bucket

Security

IAM - Identity and access management

aws iam create-user --user-name john-dev
aws iam attach-user-policy --user-name john-dev --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AdministratorAccess

Secrets Manager - Store secrets

aws secretsmanager create-secret --name prod/db-password --secret-string mypassword

KMS - Encryption keys

aws kms create-key --description "My encryption key"

Pricing Model

Pay-As-You-Go

EC2: $0.023/hour (t2.micro)
S3: $0.023/GB stored
Data transfer: $0.09/GB out
Lambda: $0.20 per 1M requests

Reserved Instances (Discount for commitment)

1-year: ~30% discount
3-year: ~60% discount

Spot Instances (70% discount, interruptible)

Good for batch jobs, non-critical workloads