Welcome to backspace Academy. We're currently at the start of all the 2
pathways to AWS certification preparation with backspace Academy 3
so it doesn't matter whether you're just going to go on and do the cloud practitioner 4
certification or if you're going to go further and do an associate level 5
certification like the developer or Solutions Architect or SysOps 6
administrator associate this is still fundamental required knowledge for you 7
to proceed any further so make sure that you don't skip over this and do it and 8
without any further ado let's get into it 9
So what is the AWS cloud? AWS has invested billions of dollars in IT 10
resources that are distributed across the globe and the use of those resources 11
are shared amongst thousands upon thousands of AWS account holders 12
now although those resources are shared amongst those account holders the 13
accounts themselves are completely isolated from each other at the 14
hypervisor level you also have the option of your own dedicated resources 15
if you wish, you as an account holder can have on-demand delivery of IT resources 16
on a pay-as-you-go pricing model with no upfront costs you only pay for what you 17
use the more you use the more you pay the less you use the less you pay when 18
you don't use it you don't pay for it when you use it you pay by the hour or 19
the minute or the second and some services even provide billing by the 20
millisecond now that provides some really good economies of scale because 21
the cost of that infrastructure is shared across thousands upon thousands 22
of account holders if you're a large enterprise that is great because you 23
don't have to worry about the capital expenditure of your own infrastructure 24
and you don't have to worry about the maintenance staff to support that 25
infrastructure now that infrastructure is organized according to a range of 26
different product types if you want to use those IT resources for pure 27
computing power AWS can do that for you, if you want to use AWS just to store 28
data AWS can do that for you as well 29
if you want to run a database as a service if you want to run a relational database a 30
noSQL database a graph database as a service AWS can do that for you and 31
they'll do that on-demand on a pay-as-you-go pricing model 32
the AWS global infrastructure is massive and is divided into geographic regions 33
and those geographic regions are divided into separate availability zones 34
as you can see there are lots of regions distributed throughout the globe for 35
this course we will be using the North Virginia region because that is the 36
largest region and supports all of the available AWS services if you're using a 37
smaller region for example Mumbai you may encounter problems if it doesn't 38
support all of the services. The AWS Gov cloud is located in the u.s. west coast 39
and is specifically for US government organizations 40
there is also an AWS secret region and I can't tell you where that is because 41
it's a secret that region is specifically for US government 42
intelligence organizations and in case you're wondering 43
yes, the CIA is a customer of AWS. Your choice of region can depend upon a number of 44
things and you may want to have the lowest latency and you want your server 45
to be located as close to your customers as possible but you may also want to 46
minimize costs for example I'm located in Sydney but I mainly use the North Virginia 47
region because it is cheaper for me you may also want to locate your 48
server in another country for regulatory reasons or you may want to be located in 49
your country for regulatory reasons so there are a number of factors to take 50
into consideration when selecting a region. Each region is divided up into at 51
least two availability zones that are physically isolated from each other this 52
provides business continuity for your infrastructure if you have it 53
distributed across multiple availability zones if one availability zone goes down 54
the infrastructure in the other availability zone will continue to operate 55
the largest region us East North Virginia has six availability zones 56
and the availability zones are connected to 57
each other through a high-speed fiber-optic network there are over 100 58
edge locations that are used for the CloudFront content delivery network 59
CloudFront can case your popular content such as images and videos and 60
distribute that to edge locations across the globe for high-speed delivery to 61
your end-users no matter where they are located and it'll do that with very low 62
latency. It also provides great protection against DDoS attacks 63
the AWS management console is a web-based interface to AWS and will use 64
it throughout the course to access AWS services and you'll also use it to 65
monitor your costs you need to have an account to access it but once you have 66
an account created you can access it simply by clicking on the my account' 67
menu from the AWS website and then selecting the management console is also 68
an AWS console mobile app and that is great for tablets you can also access 69
AWS resources through the many software development kits this allows you to 70
create applications that use AWS as a back-end. There are SDKs for all the 71
major languages and there's also a mobile SDK it's also possible to access 72
AWS with direct HTTP calls using the AWS REST API. You can also install a 73
command-line interface on your desktop and that will allow you to remotely 74
connect into AWS and also be able to create and run scripts to automate a lot 75
of the processes on AWS the AWS website is located at 76
aws.amazon.com what I want you to do now is to go to that website and bookmark 77
some pages of the website the first one is the certification page and that will 78
have links to everything you need to know about the certification process so 79
if you're not sure what certification to do or you want to know how to schedule 80
and set an exam that is a place to go the next one is the documentation page 81
throughout the course we will be referencing the documentation for the 82
services on AWS so there is a very important link and the exam it's going 83
to be testing your knowledge of a lot of this documentation AWS also has a site 84
specifically for white papers and they discuss 85
technical issues and use cases for AWS the products page gives a really good 86
overview of the main products of AWS and finally the new products and services 87
page and that'll keep you up to date on the latest things that are happening in AWS 88
okay let's get started with AWS first off go to aws.amazon.com click on 89
the orange signup button in the top right hand corner and complete that 90
signup process you'll need to have a credit card to sign up but don't be too 91
concerned as there is a free tier available for a 12-month period and most 92
of the course will be operating under that free tier we can also set up a 93
billing alert to alert you if you exceed your budget for example we can set up a 94
$5 billing alert to notify you if you exceed $5 for the month once you've 95
created that account you can then get into the management console by clicking 96
on the my account menu and selecting AWS management console coming up next will 97
be some hands-on labs on AWS services so make sure that you download the lab 98
notes that come with this introduction to AWS 99
or proceeding any further and once you've done that I'll see you in the 100
next lecture