Its Day 27 of my 100 Days of Cloud Journey, and today I’m in a bit of a spot ….
On Day 26, I started Day 1 of the Linux Cloud Engineer Bootcamp hosted by Cloudskills.io where I learned how to create Azure Linux Instances using Certificate-based authentication.
Day 2 of the Bootcamp started, and Mike is talking about Linux instances on AWS. And that stopped me in my tracks.
Why? Because I haven’t looked at AWS in all that much detail. So instead of continuing with the Linux Bootcamp, I’m going to go back to the start and learn about AWS from the start.
What I know ….
What I know about AWS at this point is that it is built primarily on 3 Core Services which are:
- EC2 – EC2 (Or “Elastic Cloud Compute” to give its full title) this is the core AWS Compute Service. Similar to Virtual Machines in Azure, you can run Windows or Linux workloads in the cloud.
- IAM – AWS IAM is how you manage permissions, think of it as the equivalent of the Azure Active Directory service as its used to grant access to resources in AWS. However, IAM also controls how AWS Services talk to each other.
- S3 – S3 is AWS’s flexible storage service, which can be used to host a variety of data types such as websites, logs, databases, backups etc.
No matter what you do in AWS, at some point you will use the core trio of EC2, IAM and S3.
Its hard to pick “Core Services”, but the others that need to be looked at are:
- RDS – AWS Hosted Database
- Route 53 – DNS Routing and Domain Purchasing/Management
- CloudWatch – Monitoring for AWS
- CloudFormation – AWS Infrastructure-as-Code
OK, so that’s the core services. But it not enough to just know about them and how they compare to Azure, I want to get in depth and get to know how AWS works and feel as comfortable in that as I do in Azure. So its time to go learning again!
AWS Learning Path
Having looked at the options, I’ve established the best place to start is at the mothership. AWS offer Free Training to prepare for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification exam:
https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-cloud-practitioner/
Having looked at the content, this is in effect the equivalent to the AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals Certification, which was the first Azure Certification I achieved. While this is a fundamentals exam and some people choose to skip this and go straight to the more technical certifications, I felt the AZ-900 was well worth taking for the giving a full overview and familiarity of Azure Services.
So that’s why I’m taking the same approach to the AWS Platform: learn from the ground up, gain an overview of all services and then go forward into the more technical aspects.
The AWS Training for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner can be found here:
Hope you enjoyed this post, I’ll keep you informed of progress! Until next time!
Michael Durkan 