My AWS Journey - Episode 1 : Knowing about AWS

I have been hearing about haing an AWS certifivate of a cloud practictioner or any valuable skills, especially when you are closely working with development with machine learning and AI integrated. But knowing the names of cloud services and actually understanding how they work, what they actually are, how these services contribute are two different things.

One of the main reasons I chose AWS is the huge number of services available for different parts of applications.

And yes, at first, it is actually a little confusing.

There are many services like:

And many more. When you are starting out, it is easy to memorize what each service does but without actually understanding its actual use, working you won't be able to understand its applications.

So, instead of memeorizing definitions of the services it is better bto understand hopw these services actually work together to build a real application.

EC2 was one of the first AWS services I came across.

The easiest way I understand it is as a virtual server that I can use to run applications without having to own and maintain a physical server myself.

There are obviously many more concepts involved, such as instance types, storage, security groups, and pricing, but understanding the basic idea made cloud computing feel much less abstract.

S3 is AWS's object storage service.

What interested me here is how different storage needs can be handled separately from the computing part of an application.

For example, an application might run on an EC2 instance while files, images, backups, or other objects are stored in S3.

Security is another area which is important when we are building a real world applications.

IAM is used to control who or what can access AWS resources and what actions they are allowed to perform.

The principle of giving users and applications only the permissions they actually need is something that needs particular attention to because access management becomes extremely important when working with cloud infrastructure.

VPC is the service for enhnaced data communication.

The idea of creating a logically isolated network in AWS and controlling how resources communicate with each other introduces a lot of networking concepts.

Subnets, route tables, internet gateways, and security groups can initially feel like a lot to remember. I am finding it easier to understand them by thinking about how an actual application would be connected rather than memorizing each definition separately.

These are the AWS concepts I have explored so far, I am still learning and definitely not done yet. I am currently diving a little deeper into EC2 and trying to understand not just what it does but also why and when it should be used.

If I come across something interesting, confusing, or useful enough that I think other learners should know about it, I'll be back with another article.

Until the next AWS rabbit hole!