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Learn AWS Cloud

7 lessons · ~65 minutes of reading

AWS has hundreds of services and almost nobody needs most of them. What you actually need is a mental map: which service solves which class of problem, and what the trade-off is against the obvious alternative.

This track builds that map in the order the pieces depend on each other — the physical layout first, then who is allowed to do what, then compute, storage, networking, data, and finally the cost and design principles that tie them together.

Each lesson names the distinctions that exams and interviews actually test, because those are almost always the boundary between two services that sound similar.

Assumes: You understand what a server, a database and an IP address are. No prior cloud experience is assumed.

Start lesson 1 →300 practice questions

The lessons

  1. 1

    How AWS is laid out, and who is responsible for what

    Regions, Availability Zones and edge locations — plus the shared responsibility line that every security question turns on.

    8 minPractise: Easy
  2. 2

    IAM: identity, policy and the evaluation order

    Understand how a request is authorised, why roles beat access keys, and what an SCP can and cannot do.

    10 minPractise: Medium
  3. 3

    Compute: EC2, containers and serverless

    Choose between instances, containers and functions on the axes that actually decide it — control, duration and idle cost.

    9 minPractise: Medium
  4. 4

    Storage: object, block and file

    Pick between S3, EBS and EFS on access pattern, and use storage classes without getting caught by minimums.

    9 minPractise: Medium
  5. 5

    Networking: VPCs, subnets and reaching things privately

    Build a VPC that is correct by construction, and know why security groups and NACLs behave differently.

    10 minPractise: Medium
  6. 6

    Databases and decoupling

    Choose a data store by access pattern, and use queues and events to stop components failing together.

    10 minPractise: Medium
  7. 7

    Cost, observability and the Well-Architected pillars

    Find where the money actually goes, monitor what matters, and apply the six design pillars.

    9 minPractise: Hard

What the practice bank covers

The lessons above are written against this syllabus, so anything in the question bank has been taught before you meet it.

  • Global infrastructure: Regions, AZs, edge locations
  • IAM: users, roles, policies, STS, permission boundaries
  • Compute: EC2, Lambda, ECS/EKS, Auto Scaling
  • Storage: S3 classes, EBS, EFS, lifecycle, durability
  • Networking: VPC, subnets, NAT, security groups vs NACLs
  • Databases: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache
  • Decoupling: SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions
  • Observability & governance: CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Config, Organizations
  • Security: KMS, Secrets Manager, WAF, Shield
  • Cost: pricing models, Savings Plans, Cost Explorer, Budgets
  • Well-Architected Framework: six pillars