AWS
The largest cloud platform, offering compute, storage, and managed services.
CurrentintermediateGuide only -- no course yet
Overview
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest cloud provider, offering compute (EC2), storage (S3), databases, and hundreds of managed services. Its breadth is both its strength and its learning curve -- most teams use a small, specific subset relevant to their stack.
- What it is
- A cloud computing platform offering on-demand compute, storage, networking, and managed services.
- Why it's used
- For elastic, pay-as-you-go infrastructure instead of buying and operating physical servers.
- Where it fits
- The deployment target for a backend/infrastructure setup; usually approached one service at a time (e.g. S3 for storage, EC2 for compute) rather than all at once.
Core concepts
- EC2 (virtual servers)
- S3 (object storage)
- IAM (identity and access management)
- Regions and availability zones
Example
IAM policies follow least-privilege: grant exactly the actions and resources needed, nothing broader -- a core AWS security discipline, not an afterthought.
// Conceptual: an IAM policy scoping access to exactly what's needed
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "s3:GetObject",
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::my-bucket/*"
}Common use cases
- Hosting web applications and APIs
- Object storage
- Managed databases
Project ideas
- Deploy a simple static site to S3 with a public read policy, understanding exactly what access it grants