AWS & Cloud Engineering
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most widely used cloud platform — it rents you compute, storage, networking, and hundreds of managed services on demand, so you pay only for what you use instead of buying and racking your own servers. Cloud engineering is the craft of stitching those services together into systems that are reliable, secure, fast, and cost-efficient. This documentation teaches AWS the way you’d actually learn it on the job: one focused topic per page, in simple language, with the when and why — not just the how — that most tutorials skip.
How these docs are organized
Every page covers a single concept and answers three questions other sites leave out: what it is, when you should (and shouldn’t) use it, and exactly how to do it — both in the AWS Console (click-by-click) and on the command line. Work top to bottom, or jump straight to what you need.
What you’ll learn
- Getting Started — what the cloud is, regions and availability zones, creating and securing an account, the Free Tier, and setting up the AWS CLI.
- IAM & Account Security — users, groups, roles, and least-privilege policies that keep your account safe.
- EC2 & Compute — launching virtual servers step by step, choosing instance types, key pairs, security groups, EBS volumes, Elastic (static) IPs, and pricing models.
- VPC & Networking — building your own private network with subnets, route tables, gateways, and firewalls; when to use public vs private subnets.
- Load Balancing & Auto Scaling — spreading traffic across servers and growing/shrinking your fleet automatically.
- Storage — S3 object storage, EBS block storage, EFS file storage, and which to pick.
- Databases — RDS, Aurora, and DynamoDB, plus SQL vs NoSQL decisions.
- Serverless — Lambda, API Gateway, and event-driven architectures with no servers to manage.
- Containers — running Docker workloads on ECS, Fargate, and EKS.
- DNS, CDN & Edge — Route 53 and CloudFront for fast global delivery.
- Monitoring — CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and X-Ray for metrics, logs, and tracing.
- Security & Compliance — encryption, secrets, and threat detection.
- Deployment & IaC — CloudFormation, CDK, CI/CD pipelines, and Terraform on AWS.
- Cost Management — pricing, budgets, and real strategies to cut your bill.
- Architecture — the Well-Architected Framework and patterns for high availability and resilience.
The two mental models to keep
Before the first service, hold onto two ideas. First, pay-as-you-go is unforgiving of forgotten resources — an idle server you left running still bills you, so always tear down experiments and set a budget alert on day one. Second, the shared responsibility model: AWS secures the cloud (data centers, hardware, the hypervisor), and you secure what you put in the cloud (your IAM policies, OS patches, firewall rules, and data). Nearly every real-world AWS incident is a customer misconfiguration, not an AWS failure.
New to AWS? Go to Creating an AWS Account, turn on MFA for the root user, and set a zero-spend budget alert before launching anything. Those three steps prevent the two most common beginner mistakes: a compromised account and a surprise bill.
Related Topics
- /aws/what-is-cloud-computing
- /aws/what-is-aws
- /aws/regions-and-az
- /aws/create-aws-account
- /aws/free-tier