AWS Overview

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s largest cloud platform — over 200 services covering compute, storage, networking, databases, AI/ML, security, and more. You pay only for what you use, with no upfront hardware costs.

Key advantages:

• Global reach — 33 regions, 105 availability zones worldwide
• Pay-as-you-go — no contracts, scale up or down instantly
• Managed services — AWS handles patching, backups, HA for many services

Global Infrastructure

Region (e.g. us-east-1)
  └── Availability Zone (AZ) — isolated data center
        └── Edge Location — CDN / Route 53 point of presence

• Region — geographic area (e.g. us-east-1 = N. Virginia, ap-south-1 = Mumbai)
• AZ — one or more physical data centers with redundant power and networking
• Edge Location — used by CloudFront (CDN) and Route 53 for low-latency delivery

Always deploy critical workloads across at least 2 AZs for high availability.

Core Service Categories

The AWS Free Tier

Great for learning — available for 12 months after account creation:

AWS CLI Quick Setup

# Install (macOS/Linux)
curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
unzip awscliv2.zip && sudo ./aws/install

# Configure credentials
aws configure
# AWS Access Key ID:     <your key>
# AWS Secret Access Key: <your secret>
# Default region:        ap-south-1
# Default output format: json

# Test it
aws sts get-caller-identity

What’s Covered in These Notes

• EC2 — virtual machines, key pairs, security groups, AMIs
• S3 — object storage, buckets, policies, static hosting
• IAM — users, roles, policies, least-privilege