Why AWS?
AWS is the world's largest cloud platform with 200+ services across compute, storage, networking, databases, AI, and more. Understanding AWS is essential for most DevOps roles.
Global Infrastructure
- Regions — geographic areas (e.g.,
us-east-1,eu-west-1). Data stays in the region unless you move it. - Availability Zones (AZs) — isolated data centres within a region. Deploy across multiple AZs for high availability.
- Edge Locations — CloudFront CDN endpoints for low-latency content delivery.
Region: us-east-1 (N. Virginia)
├── AZ: us-east-1a
├── AZ: us-east-1b
└── AZ: us-east-1c
Shared Responsibility Model
| AWS Manages | You Manage |
|---|---|
| Physical hardware | Operating system patches |
| Network infrastructure | Application security |
| Hypervisor | IAM users and permissions |
| Managed service software | Data encryption |
Core Services Overview
| Category | Services |
|---|---|
| Compute | EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS |
| Storage | S3, EBS, EFS |
| Networking | VPC, Route 53, CloudFront, ALB |
| Database | RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache |
| Security | IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager |
| Monitoring | CloudWatch, CloudTrail |
| CI/CD | CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy |
AWS CLI
# Install
brew install awscli
# Configure
aws configure
# AWS Access Key ID: AKIA...
# AWS Secret Access Key: ...
# Default region: us-east-1
# Default output format: json
# Test
aws sts get-caller-identity
aws s3 lsUse IAM roles (not access keys) for resources running inside AWS. Access keys are for local development and CI only.