A Begginer's Tale: The Good, The Bad, and the Cloudy

20 Nov 2023

Into the Cloud

Cloud services, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS), have been something I’ve wanted to understand for a while. So, for a few weeks now, I’ve been trying to get to grips with what AWS has to offer.

I initially stumbled around, watching various introductory videos and reading articles. However, it quickly became evident that there was a lot more out there than I had realized. I mean, I thought AWS was pretty much a few services around EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) instances. Yeah.

Charting a Course with AWS Certifications

I stumbled upon AWS certifications, and after a little bit of research, I thought this would be a good place to start. This also gave me a clear goal of obtaining the certification in question. The first and most basic of the certification is the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP).

I then came across an excellent Udemy course, which I have since gone through and have already learned a lot from.

Unveiling the Expanse of AWS Offerings

There are a lot of services that AWS offers, from Lambda functions for serverless compute, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for your Kubernetes deployments, Polly to read out text, or AWS Bedrock to provide the infrastructure for your Machine Learning models.

There are over 200 services to date, so choosing what to use and when is not an easy task.

Guided by Principles: Understanding the Well Architected Framework

The Well Architected Framework is a paper by Amazon that guidance on how to build your services based on six pillars: Operational Excellence, Cost Optimisation, Reliability, Security, Performance Efficiency, and Sustainability.

Each pillar has best practices to follow, which you can lean on while building out your services. There is also a Well Architected tool with which you can evaluate your current setup against the Well Architected Framework, from which you can adopt best practices as the tool recommends them.

Reflections and Revelations: The Journey So Far

There is a lot to take in, and you can build pretty much whatever you can imagine on an unlimited scale. It can seem overwhelming, but tools and the knowledge base exist to help you on the way. It is humbling in the scale you can deploy things with such ease to a global audience in seconds.