Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Understand what cloud computing is, the shared-responsibility model, and the difference between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. You will know why organisations move to the cloud and the trade-offs involved.

Learn about Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations, and how AWS distributes resources worldwide. You will be able to choose the right region for latency, compliance, and cost.

Master users, groups, roles, and policies. You will know how to apply least-privilege access and secure your AWS account from day one.

Understand on-demand vs reserved vs spot pricing, the Free Tier, AWS Budgets, and Cost Explorer so you can estimate and control cloud spend.

Launch and manage virtual servers, choose instance types, configure security groups, and attach storage. You will be comfortable running and connecting to Linux/Windows instances.

Distribute traffic across instances and automatically scale capacity up or down based on demand. You will understand ALB, NLB, and scaling policies.

Write and deploy functions that run without managing servers. You will understand triggers, cold starts, concurrency limits, and when serverless is the right choice.

Spin up simple web apps, blogs, and dev environments with Lightsail's simplified interface. A lighter alternative to EC2 for straightforward workloads.

Store and retrieve any amount of data. You will understand buckets, objects, storage classes, versioning, lifecycle policies, and static website hosting.

Attach persistent block volumes to EC2 (EBS) and share file systems across instances (EFS). You will know when to use each and how snapshots work.

Accelerate content delivery by caching at edge locations worldwide. You will set up a distribution, configure origins, and understand cache behaviours.

Design isolated networks with subnets, route tables, internet gateways, and NAT gateways. You will be able to architect a secure multi-tier network layout.

Register domains and configure DNS records, routing policies, and health checks. You will route traffic to AWS resources and external endpoints.

Connect multiple VPCs and on-premises networks. You will understand peering, Transit Gateway, Site-to-Site VPN, and Direct Connect at a conceptual level.

Deploy MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Aurora without managing the underlying server. You will configure backups, replicas, and multi-AZ deployments for high availability.

Model data with partition and sort keys, provision throughput or use on-demand mode, and query efficiently. You will know when DynamoDB is a better fit than a relational DB.

Speed up reads with Redis or Memcached managed clusters. You will understand caching strategies and session-store use cases.

Create, publish, and secure APIs that front Lambda functions or HTTP backends. You will configure stages, throttling, and authorization.

Decouple microservices with message queues (SQS) and fan-out notifications (SNS). You will understand visibility timeouts, dead-letter queues, and pub/sub patterns.

Coordinate Lambda functions and services into visual state machines. You will build retry logic, parallel branches, and error handling without custom code.

Route events between AWS services and SaaS applications using rules and event buses. You will design loosely-coupled, event-driven systems.

Push Docker images to ECR and run them on ECS with Fargate (serverless) or EC2 launch types. You will deploy a containerised application end-to-end.

Run Kubernetes on AWS without managing the control plane. You will understand when EKS makes sense versus ECS and how to deploy workloads.

Define AWS resources in YAML/JSON templates and deploy them as stacks. You will version-control your infrastructure and automate repeatable deployments.

Write infrastructure definitions in TypeScript, Python, or other languages that synthesise to CloudFormation. A higher-level alternative to raw templates.

Automate source-to-production pipelines natively on AWS. You will build, test, and deploy code changes continuously.

Collect metrics, set alarms, and centralise logs from all AWS services. You will create dashboards and respond to operational events.

Record every API call made in your account for compliance and forensic analysis. You will know how to investigate who did what and when.

Detect threats with GuardDuty, aggregate security findings with Security Hub, and protect web apps with WAF. You will build a defence-in-depth posture.

Store secrets securely and manage encryption keys. You will encrypt data at rest and in transit across AWS services.

Apply the six pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost optimisation, and sustainability — to evaluate and improve your designs.

Combine multi-AZ deployments, auto scaling, health checks, and failover strategies to build systems that survive component failures.

Right-size instances, leverage Savings Plans, use spot fleets, and architect for cost efficiency without sacrificing reliability.