How I Would Learn AWS Today (after 10 years of cloud experience)

Summary

In this video, the creator of "Be A Better Dev" shares insights on how to effectively learn AWS today, drawing from a decade of cloud experience. The video is a comprehensive guide for beginners and outlines the essential steps to mastering AWS. It starts with the prerequisites you should have under your belt before diving into AWS, followed by an overview of key AWS concepts and services you need to know. The creator emphasizes the importance of hands-on projects for skill development and provides numerous resources and tips to aid learning. Besides covering study and project-building strategies, the video addresses whether AWS certifications are necessary and offers encouragement to those feeling overwhelmed.

Highlights

• Overcome the initial AWS overwhelm by knowing what to focus on first. 🎯
• Learn networking basics and Linux OS fundamentals. 💻
• Understand AWS global infrastructure and services like EC2, S3, and IAM. 🖥️
• The best way to learn AWS is by doing, not just watching. 👨‍🔧
• Use projects to apply AWS concepts practically and strengthen your resume. 📈
• AWS certifications are optional; practical skills are key. ✅
• Consistent learning through community engagement and resources is crucial. 🌱

Key Takeaways

• Dive into AWS basics after grasping fundamental concepts like networking and Linux. 🌐
• Get hands-on with AWS through structured projects to build real-world skills. 💪
• Master key AWS services and their practical applications with engaging resources. 📚
• AWS certifications can be beneficial, but on-the-ground experience is invaluable. 🎓
• Join communities and stay updated with newsletters for continuous learning. 📰
• Don’t give up! AWS can be complex, but perseverance pays off in the end. 🚀

Overview

Starting with the foundations is crucial for anyone diving into AWS. Before tackling AWS-specific content, you need a grasp of basic networking and operating system fundamentals, particularly Linux, given its prevalence in cloud environments. Command-line basics and understanding a programming language like Python will also set a solid ground for your AWS journey.

Once you're grounded in the basics, the video emphasizes getting hands-on with AWS services. This practical approach is where the learning truly solidifies. The creator suggests beginning with projects that allow you to experiment with services such as EC2, S3 for storage, and IAM for managing permissions. These projects not only enhance understanding but also build portfolio-worthy experience.

Beyond hands-on projects, the video covers the role of AWS certifications and encourages ongoing engagement with AWS communities and resources. Whether it's newsletters or forums, keeping abreast of new developments ensures that learning continues to be dynamic and comprehensive. Ultimately, perseverance and a willingness to tackle AWS challenges head-on are presented as key tenets for success.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Overwhelm with AWS The chapter 'Introduction and Overwhelm with AWS' discusses the author's initial experience dealing with AWS after landing a software engineer role at Amazon nearly a decade ago. It outlines how the author felt overwhelmed and anxious about not knowing much about AWS, fearing failure and embarrassment at work. The chapter also recounts the author's efforts to self-learn AWS through various online resources, including the AWS website, following the receipt of their job offer.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Creating a Learning Guide for AWS The chapter titled 'Creating a Learning Guide for AWS' emphasizes the difficulty and overwhelming nature of learning AWS due to the vast amount of content available, especially on platforms like YouTube. The speaker acknowledges the lack of structured content ten years ago and intends to provide a guide that highlights essential AWS knowledge, helping learners focus on what is necessary, what can be ignored, and what can be learned gradually. This guide is intended to be beneficial for those attempting to learn AWS or starting new roles involving AWS.
• 02:00 - 05:30: Prerequisites for Learning AWS This chapter starts by covering high-level prerequisites necessary for learning AWS. It introduces various AWS services, providing just the introductory information needed to understand them. The chapter outlines some key goals for learners as they progress. Additionally, it offers a wealth of resources, including links to various helpful pages and a detailed mind map with embedded links for easy access to further information.
• 07:00 - 09:00: Understanding AWS Global Infrastructure The chapter, 'Understanding AWS Global Infrastructure,' outlines a framework for building real skills in AWS. It emphasizes that while reading documentation and watching YouTube videos is helpful, gaining confidence through personal practice is vital. The author shares their perspective on the best methods to learn AWS effectively and concludes with additional resources and tips they wished they had when starting out. This forms the core agenda of the video.
• 09:00 - 24:00: Fundamental AWS Concepts and Services This chapter introduces fundamental concepts and services in AWS, starting with prerequisites for learning AWS effectively. The speaker mentions a resourceful mind map, available via a link in the video description, which serves as a comprehensive guide with hyperlinks for each section covered. This mind map is suggested as a tool to navigate and approach AWS learning systematically.
• 24:00 - 31:00: AWS Certification and Its Importance This chapter discusses the importance of AWS certification and begins by emphasizing the need to understand basic foundational concepts related to AWS before diving into specific AWS topics. It highlights the significance of having certain prerequisites to avoid feeling overwhelmed when learning AWS. The chapter introduces a 'suggested prerequisite section' detailing the essential knowledge one should possess before delving into AWS topics.
• 31:00 - 41:00: Building AWS Skills with Projects The chapter discusses the importance of understanding basic networking fundamentals for building AWS skills. It mentions a helpful resource, a video from the YouTube channel Catamind, which explains how the internet functions, including the process that occurs when a website address is entered into a browser. The video covers how internet resources are located and returned to the user, including the transfer of HTML and JavaScript. Additionally, the chapter highlights the necessity of knowledge in networking, such as understanding IP addresses.
• 44:30 - 51:00: Studying AWS Architectures Chapter focuses on essential knowledge for studying AWS architectures, emphasizing a foundational understanding of internet workings.
• 51:00 - 57:00: Creating Your Own Projects This chapter emphasizes the importance of mastering basic terminal commands and navigation for creating your own projects. While complex commands like 'sed' or 'grep' aren't necessary, understanding how to switch directories, create, view, and delete files is crucial. These skillsets are essential, especially when needing to SSH into machines or boxes, where a lack of knowledge could lead to confusion and require learning on the spot.
• 57:00 - 66:00: Extra Tips for AWS Learning The chapter discusses the need for programming knowledge when learning AWS. It highlights that understanding a programming language can be essential depending on one's focus within AWS. For instance, cloud support engineers or some DevOps professionals might require programming skills. However, it's suggested that having knowledge of at least one programming language could be beneficial for anyone diving into AWS.
• 66:00 - 70:00: Conclusion and Encouragement This chapter provides a recommendation for learning Python, highlighting its ease of use due to its dynamic typing and straightforward syntax. It explains that Python is beginner-friendly, allowing learners to grasp programming constructs easily, such as loops and conditional statements. Furthermore, Python's versatility is emphasized, as it can be used across various domains, including building web applications. The chapter encourages learners to consider Python as a valuable tool for diverse programming tasks.

How I Would Learn AWS Today (after 10 years of cloud experience) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 when I first got my job at Amazon as a software engineer nearly a decade ago now I remember knowing very very little about AWS and this was a really really anxiety-inducing thing for me I thought that if I didn't know anything about this I would fail at my job I wouldn't be able to succeed and everyone would laugh at me and I remember when I first got my offer letter from Amazon I tried to learn as much as I could about AWS and I distinctly remember trying to go through all the different resources online including the AWS website and
• 00:30 - 01:00 YouTube and just getting completely overwhelmed with all of the details at that time there wasn't a lot of good content but even now it's still very very overwhelming for people to figure out what do they need to know what can they ignore and what will they figure out later as they go along and what I want to do in this video is create for you a guide that I wish I had 10 years ago and I want to include things that I think personally that you need to know if you're trying to learn AWS or maybe you're starting a new job that's going
• 01:00 - 01:30 to leverage AWS and so this video is going to walk you through all of those details we're going to start pretty high level with just some prerequisites then we're going to dive into some of the different services that you're going to want to know just introductory stuff some of the goals that you should have as you go along and then I'm also going to give you a ton of resources along the way so links to certain things that you can come to this page this mind map that I'm going to show you in a moment here it's going to have embedded links so you can click on this stuff and go directly to the page you're going to have all the resources right in front of you and then
• 01:30 - 02:00 I'm also going to give you a framework for how I think you should go about building your real skills for AWS because you know reading documentation watching YouTube videos is one thing but actually building and gaining the confidence to build on your own is a completely different thing so I'm going to give you a framework that I think is the best way in my personal opinion to learn AWS and then at the end I'm going to give you some extra resources and extra tips that I wish I had if I was starting from scratch so that's the agenda for this video so let's start
• 02:00 - 02:30 from scratch and the first thing that I want to talk about is just some of the prerequisites that I think that you should have when you are starting to learn ews and just as an FYI I'm going to put a link to this mind map in the description section of this video down below so you'll be able to visit this mind map and check out all the resources there's going to be hyperlinks and a lot of the different sections that we cover so this can really be a resource for you that you keep as kind of a map of how you should approach things and so that'll be available for you down below
• 02:30 - 03:00 all right so let's get right into it the first thing I want to talk about is learning the basics like the basic fundamentals of AWS but before we even get to AWS specifically there are a couple things that you need to know about some prerequisites if you will that you should kind of have under your belt so that when you hit the AWS stuff you're not going to be like overwhelmed with just some basic things that you don't really know about so that's what I want to talk about here in the suggested prerequisite section so let's expand this section out so the first thing that
• 03:00 - 03:30 I think is imperative is just some basic networking fundamentals and there's a really good video that I I came across it's how the internet works and it basically describes to you like when you put in a website address in the URL of your browser what happens how does the internet know kind of where to find the resources how does that HTML and JavaScript all that good stuff gets sent back to you so this is a really quick video by a catamind I think is the YouTube channel that walks through those processes but you should also know like a little bit about you know networking stuff like IP addresses you don't really
• 03:30 - 04:00 need to know too much about subnets or anything like that just basically how the internet works in general the next thing that you should know about is operating systems and virtual machines more specifically Linux in general because Linux is kind of the OS of choice in AWS and in the cloud so you should know about that and you should know about just like the concept of virtual machines there's a bunch of great resources out there for this so I'm not going to bore you with that the next thing that you should know about is just some command line basics and I'm
• 04:00 - 04:30 not talking about like complicated you know said or grep stuff like you don't really need to go into too much detail but just know how to navigate the terminal how to switch directories how to create files how to view files how to delete things move things around just very basic fundamental stuff because you're going to find that occasionally you're going to need to like SSH or connect to a box connect to a machine and so if you don't know how this works when the time comes that you have to do that you're going to be like what is this stuff and you have to go down a path of learning that specific thing and
• 04:30 - 05:00 then that's going to Sidetrack you from actually learning the thing that you want to learn which is AWS and this one programming language so this one is a little bit debatable and it really depends on what you're focusing on so certain kind of parts of AWS you don't necessarily need to know a programming language so say for example if you're like a cloud support engineer or maybe even a devops person but it depends on the devops person then you're not necessarily going to need to know a programming language but I do highly suggest that you have at least one under
• 05:00 - 05:30 your belt and in terms of the one that I suggest this again is very debatable I suggest Python and the reason is well there's two reasons it's pretty easy to learn in the sense that it's a dynamically typed language there's not it's not very verbose so it's kind of straightforward you're going to learn a lot about the constructs like for Loops if statements all that stuff very beginner friendly and it's also applicable to many many different domains like you can build a full back end for a web application using python
• 05:30 - 06:00 you can also use it for it's very widely used in data processing so if you want to be like a bi engineer or like a data engineer for example Python's a great language to know also very applicable for data scientists too they do a lot of data manipulation and training of their ml models using python so overall it's a good starting point if you don't already have a programming language under your belt if you already know programming language don't bother with learning python but this is just a suggestion that I wanted to give and the last prerequisite that I wanted to share and please please don't skip this this
• 06:00 - 06:30 there's way too many people that skip this and it ends up biting them either through a surprise bill or other problems I created a video which is a new AWS account checklist and there's about five different things that you need to do to secure your AWS account and prevent like mistakes from happening don't be like one of those people that you see on Reddit or the internet that have like a twenty thousand dollar bill or something I've been that person at one point not twenty thousand dollars of course but you know a small amount but still no one wants to pay for things that you didn't intend to pay for so just follow these steps you're going to
• 06:30 - 07:00 secure your account you're going to ensure that you understand the free tier things like that and it's going to help you out in the long run okay so that is it for the prerequisites or the things that you need to know before you get into AWS um so let's move on now to some of the fundamental AWS Concepts that I think you need to know about and this is just kind of like an introduction phase you're not going too deep into the services like understanding all the details and the specifics it's just to kind of get your feet wet to understand the lay of the land so to speak and so
• 07:00 - 07:30 let's walk through this so the first thing to understand is the global AWS infrastructure so like what does it mean to be on AWS to be in the cloud and there's two kind of subfields or subtopics to understand they're pretty simple so the first one is Regions and the other one is availability zones regions are just kind of geographic areas that have multiple different data centers within them isolated data centers and then availability zones are instances of those data centers so
• 07:30 - 08:00 they're areas where you deploy your infrastructure to and typically we deploy our infrastructure to multiple different availability zones so that we can can achieve higher levels of availability so just understand these Concepts so there is a link right here that links to the AWS documentation that talks about these two things just briefly but you know it's going to basically reiterate what I just told you now so yeah understand Global AWS infrastructure and just what ews has to offer from like a service perspective now the other topic is now we're
• 08:00 - 08:30 starting to get into the the meat and potatoes of this which is the AWS services that I think that you should know about if you're a beginner and the way this works is that there are there's like 250 AWS services and no one knows them all I don't know them all I probably know like I don't know maybe 50 of them or so but they're the important 50 and depending on what your your specialization is like if you're a data scientist you're going to know a certain set of services if you're a full stack engineer you know a different set of services but there is kind of this
• 08:30 - 09:00 common ground that no matter what your specialization is you're probably going to be working with this service so that's what I wanted to cover here for the services section and again the intention here is to not to go too deep into these Services just understand what they are what they do and generally how they work and what they offer so there's a couple different categories that I have for you here so the first one is for networking and this is just networking fundamentals so this is for VPC or virtual private cloud and the VPC
• 09:00 - 09:30 is basically a logical isolation of all of your resources in AWS and your VPC is just for your account my VPC is just for my account and the way AWS works is unless there's explicit permission between these two vpcs we can't talk to each other so it's an isolated kind of area within AWS that you have access to and that you can protect your private resources for example so this is a link to another good video by catamind where he walks through vpcs I really like that
• 09:30 - 10:00 guy's Channel by the way so make sure you just kind of understand what a VPC is why it's important important how it works maybe do a little bit of understanding of like IP address and subnets at this point but if you don't get it don't worry about it because by default in your AWS account you do get a VPC for free although you may run into some problems if you don't understand security groups in particular tend to bite people the most when they're learning so probably you want to learn about security groups I do have a video of this of security groups in particular
• 10:00 - 10:30 on my AWS Channel I didn't link it here but if you just type security groups you should be able to find it okay so now let's talk about compute and for compute pretty straightforward ec2 elastic compute Cloud this is just the idea that you're renting servers from AWS that's all it is and you can kind of rent a server and use it as you want and then give it back when you're done and AWS maintains that server for you and you can do whatever you want on it you can install I don't know grafana you can install like an RDS database like a
• 10:30 - 11:00 postgres database you can like mine Bitcoin although I think that's against the terms of service so you probably don't want to do that but let us know what ec2 is maybe as part of your learning you want to just boot up a T2 micro which is part of the free tier so you can do that for free and just play with it SSH into it maybe install something update some packages see how it works it's good to know just kind of how it works and it's good to know a little bit about ec2s because you're probably going to cross them at some point in your career uh the next thing is in terms of storage and this one is a
• 11:00 - 11:30 big one S3 is used all over the place so no matter what your domain is S3 is kind of like the bread and butter of AWS it's also like one of the first Services if not the first service I'm blanking it's either S3 SNS uh sqs or ec2 someone correct me in the comments if if you know and by the way if you haven't already go and like this video because I'm sure there's a lot of people that can benefit from this and if you like it it really helps out the channel and helps get this to more eyes so I would
• 11:30 - 12:00 really appreciate if you do that so anyways learn about S3 and um S3 is actually very easy to use it's just like a file store so you can go to the AWS console you can upload a file you can download that file I would at this point I would just do that and understand basically how it works you don't really need to know too much more and then next in terms of databases so this is a prickly one so there's two that I put here because I think they're
• 12:00 - 12:30 they're equally important so there's RDS which is kind of like the classic database that most people kind of think of when they when you say database so you know you're writing SQL to interact with your your data sets um and that's a service in AWS it's called the relational database service like I have in front of you here and so you can launch postgres Microsoft SQL Server um there's also a variant of of RDS called Aurora which is kind of an in-house generated database engine that's built by Amazon or AWS rather and
• 12:30 - 13:00 so just know about what RDS is and kind of some basics of it you know I already told you a little bit but you know you may want to read a bit more and then in terms of dynamodb dynamodb is another really popular AWS service it's used extensively it's a document store so similar to mongodb um and it's also a nosql to type database so it's very good for key value lookups and yeah just know a little bit about Dynamo it is a little bit prickly
• 13:00 - 13:30 because there's a lot to know about dynamodb but just know that it's a document store it's good for key value stuff it's high performance High scale High availability and like 90 percent of AWS and Amazon is backed or is hosted on dynamodb don't call me on that I don't know the actual number I just know that a lot of services that we use if not most of them use dynamodi beam so in terms of a resource for this I have a comparison video between RDS and dynamodb instead of giving you like an RDS video and then a Dynam would be video then you're trying to piece them
• 13:30 - 14:00 together just go watch this video I introduce you to both of them it's like 30 minutes or something but it's worth it and you're able to understand very easily kind of what these things do oh I think I forgot to talk about this one so this is also one of my videos for S3 under the storage section it's just a Core Concepts for S3 gives you a brief introduction so you should probably watch that one too now in terms of security also very very good good to know which is IAM or identity and access management this is an extremely important concept and service to
• 14:00 - 14:30 understand because IEM governs permissions and in AWS permissions are everywhere you need to have explicit permissions to access things you can deny permissions to certain people and IAM is the system that allows you to do that in fact even the account that you register for in AWS it's in the IAM section so you have an IEM user so knowing how to get the credentials or the keys for your account so that you can use the AWS CLI that's going to be
• 14:30 - 15:00 in IEM so you should know about how that works and I have a video of this where I walk through these key Concepts so the the concept of users roles groups keys and credentials user logins all that kind of stuff so you can watch this video and understand it end to end and you should be good to go at that point okay I want to address the elephant in the room here for the fundamentals of AWS Concepts and some of you may be wondering this and I want to just tackle it head on and so the elephant in the room is this should you do your AWS certification if you are trying to learn
• 15:00 - 15:30 AWS fundamentals now I am of the personal opinion that this is not necessary but for some of you that need a very structured approach to learning this may be a good thing to do personally I never did the AWS certification I learned by doing and over 10 years I don't know many people like internally at Amazon that actually are AWS certified we learn by doing and you'll see later that is the best way in my opinion to learn AWS so do you need a
• 15:30 - 16:00 certification no will it benefit you maybe it depends on kind of your position and whether or not you have the will to study for something and then pay you know I think it's like a hundred dollars or something per exam but one thing to do is don't be that guy or girl that does your AWS certification and you don't really have any practical experience after like you think you're an expert like you're not really going to be confident with AWS until you get your hands dirty and built so if you
• 16:00 - 16:30 want to do your certification go ahead but just make sure you follow it up with actual practical projects which is actually one of the the follow-up sections that we're going to talk about here but if you do decide to do your certification then there's probably two that you should do so you should start with the AWS Cloud practitioner which is just like very very basic what is the cloud kind of thing and you learn some of these services that we talked about here but no Hands-On stuff it's just kind of pure Theory and kind of why AWS is good kind of thing and then the
• 16:30 - 17:00 solutions architect associate is a little bit more in detail so you learn about how to actually build things how services are connected that kind of stuff so more applicable more practical and kind of more useful so if you do go down this path I would tackle both of these and I have the links to them below and if you really want like maybe you can't afford it or you listen to live in a less privileged country I would just kind of read all the different items in these different curriculums for these um to exam and then go ahead and try and learn them so yeah that's the elephant in the room so the tldr is maybe you
• 17:00 - 17:30 should do your certification it depends but at the end of the day you should always do practical projects which is actually the topic for the next section so let's let's jump into it so we're going to go to the build your skills section and this is really where you're gonna kind of hone your skills you've learned previous in the previous section hopefully at this point you learned about some of the key AWS services that are at your disposal you kind of have a lay of the land maybe you've messed in the console for a little while you're comfortable you know what's what and
• 17:30 - 18:00 you're ready to actually do something interesting now and like I was mentioning we were talking about the certification the best way hands down I don't care what anyone says to learn AWS is through Hands-On projects the skills that you you develop the time that you spend trying to debug things when they're not working is extremely extremely valuable that's how knowledge is gained it's not learned by just watching YouTube videos or watching other people do it it's by getting into the weeds and doing it yourself and in
• 18:00 - 18:30 order to do that you need to have well-structured projects for you to accomplish something and so that's what building your skills is all about gaining the confidence to actually be able to do things on your own so what the goal is here is to do a project and so what are the different resources like how am I going to know how to do a project like I'm not a genius I can't just think of an idea like oh I want to build Twitter well where do I start how do I know that right so you need to start small like don't don't try and create the the world or create Heaven
• 18:30 - 19:00 and Earth and kind of accomplish a massive thing you need to start with like tiny incremental projects that kind of get your feet wet and then expand your knowledge base out so that you can start layering on more services and more options so that you can gain that incremental knowledge in the beginning it's kind of going to suck because you need to learn about a bunch of different things at once but once you have that fundamental base down then everything else comes naturally so there's a bunch of different ways that you can do certain projects and so the first one
• 19:00 - 19:30 that I want to talk about is through YouTube because of course YouTube is free if you're watching this video right now thank you and so some project ideas that I have in terms of YouTube are right here so the first one is people typically start with this by the way which is website hosting so you can do this first one which is uh this is these first four are my videos from my YouTube channel and I'll talk about them briefly here um so WordPress website hosting everyone knows what WordPress is it's a Blog right you can go to my website
• 19:30 - 20:00 beabetterdev.com this video that I created was based on the things that I learned when I built that website so if you like how that looks and like hey I want to do something similar just go and watch this video it's it's WordPress it's pretty straightforward and for those of you that are maybe kind of older or you know about like other hosting providers like digitalocean and stuff um the the technology that you use here is AWS light cell and that is the closest thing to like digitalocean it's kind of stupid proof in the sense that it makes it easy to set all this stuff up without having to know all the
• 20:00 - 20:30 complexity of AWS so you're kind of shielded from all the details but you also get a really good product at the end of the day that scale herbal and elastic and you know you have something to show on your portfolio the other option is to use for static website hosting if you want to like build a react app for example and have like a single page application this is another one of my AWS videos um it's about like 25 or 30 minutes where I show you how to create a website static website using Amazon S3 cloudfront I think we use IEM in there
• 20:30 - 21:00 there's a bunch of different services that we that we use but at the end of the day you get a react app that like a starting point for you to create so you can do with that which you will now getting into a little bit more complicated projects so this one is particularly interesting I had a lot of fun creating this so I wanted to create a serverless web crawler this is a classic by the way system design interview question where you know you get into a room someone asks you how would you build a serverless web crawler that's going to crawl the internet or
• 21:00 - 21:30 how would you build Google how would you build the page rank algorithm something like that and so what I wanted to do is kind of something similar with that so so in this video serverless web crawler it's a three-part Series this is a link to the playlist but I show you how to build that out how to design it from the beginning how to implement it and then a demonstration of it so this should probably be like a paid course or something but I just had fun doing it and I think you can learn a lot you see a lot of my thought process too so this is a really good course
• 21:30 - 22:00 um not course really good video for you to learn about how to build something and how to design something that will actually scale using some very common native us Services I think I use dynamodb here in Lambda predominantly and sqs is the third service uh okay and then this one inventory stock Notifier so this was like during covid when everyone was trying to buy webcams I'm not using the webcam right now that I bought using the thing I built here but um I was trying to buy a webcam and like everyone was buying webcams when covid came and you can buy
• 22:00 - 22:30 one so I was like okay I need one for work so I built a tool that would basically scrape the website of a retailer and figure out when it comes in stock and then send me a text notification to my phone and then I would just go on the website and buy it and it actually worked it worked in like a day so um it may be a little bit out of date now it's an older video and the quality probably isn't that great but still there's a lot to learn now another good YouTube resource are Adrian Cantrell's mini project videos he has a lot of this stuff they are free and they're pretty
• 22:30 - 23:00 good quality you can check those out as well he covers a lot of different areas um I like that guy's stuff he does some good work now if YouTube isn't for you or you want something a little bit more structured then you can start moving into the paid content action and so there's a bunch of different resources that you can use but I'm going to give you two here and this is a Shameless plug to my own course here that was designed for the specific purpose of helping people learn and build on AWS
• 23:00 - 23:30 through a practical project and it's called the AWS learning accelerator and in this course you use some of the most fundamental AWS services that we just talked about right here so you use Lambda instead of vc2 use S3 use dynamodb use IEM use API Gateway you use SNS these are like the bread and Butters and so I created this course to specifically tackle the problem of people that are trying to learn AWS or maybe they did their certification but they're not yet feeling confident and looking for a guided Hands-On project
• 23:30 - 24:00 that's going to show you how to you know here's a problem that we want to solve here is a bunch of different services that we can use to solve that problem here are the ones that we are going to use here's the design and now let's go and do it and it's kind of a walk through end to end and so you can check that out and I did create a promotional code for you guys so you can use this link so the first 50 people that sign up with the course get 15 off it costs right now 65 dollars which I think is pretty reasonable given the content I
• 24:00 - 24:30 spent probably like hundreds of hours on this thing kind of thinking it up designing it building it so I appreciate if you if you at the minimum could check it out on the website there's a course trailer too so you can see what it's all about but use the coupon code learn AWS now to redeem it if you have a problem just email me it's Daniel be a betterdev.com and I can help you out and the other one is uh by Neil Davis digital cloud training he's got a YouTube channel as well this is a subscription model so you pay by the month but he's also got some excellent Labs I remember even when I was trying
• 24:30 - 25:00 to learn AWS back in the day I watched a bunch of his videos it's a really good teacher and just a good guy in general I've met him before so go and check out his stuff he may provide a coupon code which I will put in the description section of this video if he does I emailed him he hasn't gotten back to me yet but if he does I'll put it down below if not sorry guys quick update on this guys Neil just got back to me and provided a 15 discount coupon for his solution architect associate training package I've gone ahead and updated this mind map with the details of it so you
• 25:00 - 25:30 can go ahead and find the link to the Mind map and the discount code is embedded as a hyperlink in this section and then if you are looking for other project ideas you can go to this link here which is um I created a PDF it's got five different project ideas there's like a CI CD pipeline there's an event orchestration there's building an HTTP API there's five different of them there it's absolutely free you just have to sign up for my um like newsletter thing
• 25:30 - 26:00 and confirm your email the newsletter that's something I want to come back to later which is also useful but that's something if you want to be a little bit more self-guided and you just want some ideas for projects you can go and check that out as well and then last is AWS work shops now I'm a little bit mixed on this I put this here just because it's a common resource that people refer to when they're suggesting like how to get project ideas and all that but the problem with AWS workshops if you go to this website it's not in the content
• 26:00 - 26:30 itself it's the way the website is structured so like at the top Banner at least how it exists today when I checked it out it requires you to pick the services that you want to use but if you're trying to build a project and you don't know much about AWS how do you know what services you want to use so if you know that stuff in advance then great you can come here and click the ones and filter it down but if you don't then you're kind of out of luck so if you work for AWS and you know someone that manages this website please tell
• 26:30 - 27:00 them to fix it because I just don't think it's a good approach but you know that's neither here nor them okay so at this point um You probably have done a project or you're thinking about doing a project maybe you built the website you got something for your portfolio hopefully you're feeling good about kind of services that are at play some of the concepts you're kind of looking for the next steps you're trying to to build and enhance your skill set so that's where the next step comes in for those of you that are starting to get to the next level and that's where it comes to studying AWS architectures and this is
• 27:00 - 27:30 something a strategy that I used extensively even to this day just out of sheer curiosity I go and learn about what other people build on AWS I go and redesign documents for AWS Services I attend kind of design reviews for things that are completely outside of my domain just so I can see like what are other people doing and how does it work and what's their thought process and sometimes it's a completely different problem domain that I have zero experience in but I learn a lot by just being there and getting exposed to that
• 27:30 - 28:00 different information and different thinkers and maybe there's a different perspective that I never thought of before different specialization that I did didn't have background in so studying different AWS architectures and participating in reviews is extremely valuable so a couple resources that are at your disposal for this so this one is key so AWS reference architecture so this is a link that you can go to it's provided by AWS and there's hundreds of reference architectures that exist on this website these are real designs for real problems they are built I don't
• 28:00 - 28:30 think the diagrams themselves are built by companies but an AWS person puts them together so like companies like 3M for example or IBM or I don't know like Motorola whatever I'm just spending out random names now but they use AWS and AWS works with them to understand how they're using it and they put together these really great architecture diagrams for you and they lay out kind of how it works how things are connected and it gives you a lot of background in terms of how they're solving their problems so seeing different perspectives is key
• 28:30 - 29:00 here so that's what this is all about so you can go check out this link you can also filter based on domains so if you want to do like analytics services or database services or event orchestration or something else then you can go and do that and some sub resources here so I have a bunch of different videos where I go through different architectures that I found interesting that and talk about them like oh this is interesting why did they do that or look at how this is connected that's an interesting choice here's why I think they did that probably for scale or availability or
• 29:00 - 29:30 something else so there's about like seven or eight videos here that you can watch on my YouTube channel and this is a link to the playlist right here and you can check that out to get my commentary on them now AWS also has their own explanation of these diagrams via blog posts so if you're a reader and you want the quality from AWS curated resources or curated blog posts you can go ahead and just read that and then in addition there's third party architecture discussions on aws's YouTube channel so they have a YouTube channel themselves and they have clients
• 29:30 - 30:00 that come from you know IBM Motorola wherever and they're they're right there blackboarding with an AWS person the AWS person is asking them questions and the person is kind of going through their architecture and describing what they did and why the only problem with this is that on the AWS YouTube channel it's hard to find these videos they look a certain way in terms of the thumbnail but I just went to their YouTube and there's like there's no playlist for this um so you're gonna kind of have to like scroll and try to find them again if you work for AWS please tell someone to fix
• 30:00 - 30:30 this because it would help everyone a lot but yeah so that's it for studying AWS architecture so next well before we get into next um now you're starting to get into kind of more confidence right you're like you're reading other AWS architectures you're seeing the types of problems that are people people are solving they're not maybe they're completely different to you maybe they're similar to you but they used a different approach or a different service one thing that I want to add here is that something that you'll find as you learn is that there's many ways to skin a cat and there's many ways to
• 30:30 - 31:00 build a solution for a particular problem and there's also many different services that are offered by AWS that do very similar things and can be used so this is where people get tripped up because there's many different way ways to do the same thing and they get overwhelmed so studying different AWS architectures will give you that background so you can say like huh oh there's ec2 I can use that to host my API oh there's also a Lambda function huh maybe I should should use that or what's the difference why did that team
• 31:00 - 31:30 use it so these are the types of questions that should come up in your mind as you're going through this stuff like what are the different services that do something similar to what I'm trying to do and then go and read about it Go and learn watch X versus Y video I have a bunch of those on my channel like ec2 versus Lambda versus ECS notorious question people always ask why should I use one or the other there's a video on that so go and learn about that stuff and that's where people get confused the most so spend some time trying to understand the difference between the services okay so moving on now to the
• 31:30 - 32:00 next as I said you're gaining your knowledge you're gaining insight and now you're ready to move on and so this is really where it comes down to you and this is all about creating your own project ideas so you've learned about what other people are doing hopefully you drew some inspiration from it um maybe it's something similar to your problem area maybe it's not but you want to try something new and so think about something think about like a product that exists out in the world like Twitter like Facebook like Google like um serverless web crawler like uh I
• 32:00 - 32:30 don't know anything like different types of problems right and be creative here and you're reading about other people's solutions to problems so maybe you can try and emulate that and create a little prototype that doesn't need to scale and work at the capacity that it does at these companies but at least you're able to be creative here and this is also where personalization starts to come in now depending on your specialization area like if you're a full stack engineer then the projects that you pick here are going to be in that domain if you're an ml scientist then obviously
• 32:30 - 33:00 the projects are going to use something like AWS sagemaker so being able to come up with project ideas that are related to your domain that are something that are interesting to you I think is key and so a bunch of different tips here or different project ideas that I just came up with with so if you're a full stack engineer build a Twitter clone doesn't need to work perfectly who cares um figure it out I mean it doesn't need to be super sophisticated use react use S3 use something for your apis it's a full stack app you'll get a lot of great experience and you'll have some cool
• 33:00 - 33:30 stuff on your portfolio if you complete a bunch of these if you're like a data engineer or maybe even a bi engineer learn how to build a data ingestion and processing pipeline maybe you can get like a feed of RSS newsletter subscriptions or newsletters something like that build a pipeline that consumes those notifications maybe like a web scraper for example like persistently scrape a website and push those into AWS and then process them for example another great idea if you're into like the devops side of things these two
• 33:30 - 34:00 projects are great so anomaly detection dashboard so maybe you have like a metric that you're trying to identify when it comes out of a certain band so build a dashboard using Amazon Cloud watch that can monitor for that another good idea the last one is a CI CD pipe applying continuous integration continuous deployment regardless of who you are you're probably going to want to see ICD pipeline again I have a video on this I didn't link it here but you can check it on my channel just type in Ci or CD it should pop up but another great skill to have under your tool belt is
• 34:00 - 34:30 knowing about CI CD pipelines so at this point you should be pretty confident like you may struggle a little bit of what service to use and again like that course that I built the AWS learning accelerator does that it talks about kind of how these different Services compare and which ones are useful which ones I considered which ones I threw out because of X reasons so again I'm just going to plug that but at this point you should be be able to come up with these ideas and like put together a solution it may not be the most beautiful thing but at least you're going to have
• 34:30 - 35:00 something to put on your resume if you don't have any Cloud experience and the idea with this is that after you create your own project ideas you basically go in a loop right you go back you do the project you learn about new things you watch new content that's related to it then you read more documentation about stuff that uses those Services understand how they actually use it and then once you do that you come up with new project ideas so this is a flywheel you're constantly going in a circle where you start a project learn about it create an idea start from scratch and
• 35:00 - 35:30 this my friends is how you get good at AWS it's by building Hands-On in the cloud in the console and solving real life problems you're not going to learn by you know watching this video but I it's not meant to to teach you these things but it's meant to give you a framework for how to think and this is what I wish I had 10 years ago when I started if I had this I feel like I would have been much more successful and these are the lessons that I wish someone told me so you know do with that
• 35:30 - 36:00 as you wish now I did also want to give you some extra tips at the end here because there are some things that I think are are useful to know to know about here to enhance your skills a little bit more the first one is to join a community and read and ask questions I find this is especially true if you just don't know anyone and you want to gain more knowledge and gain more experience the best way to learn is by reading what other people are doing kind of similar in terms of the reading this one here
• 36:00 - 36:30 the the studying AWS architectures but uh there's some suggestions here so the one that I use personally a lot is the AWS subreddit so reddit.com r slash AWS this has people from like all over the world a lot of them work at Amazon including myself so you're going to get some really high quality eyes on stuff so there's news announcements here too this is how I stay current personally like I come here maybe once a day check things out people ask interesting questions sometimes I give my feedback very very good subreddit to be a part of
• 36:30 - 37:00 the other one is AWS just announced like a version of stack Overflow that's it's called the repost and they also have some like social side of it so like there's questions questions and answers that people ask and get answers to I believe this is a replace into their forums that they had previously but don't hold me to that but it's also a good resource as well so again these are two links you can just click this and go directly to the website okay next newsletters newsletters are great because they come directly to your inbox
• 37:00 - 37:30 and you don't need to like seek stuff out it comes to you so two suggestions here again a Shameless plug so I have a kind of relatively infrequent I try to do it bi-weekly but sometimes it's like once a month so here's a link to it it's my newsletter where I talk about like different relevant AWS updates like news announcements things that I think you should know about I also capture all the videos that I come up with and give you like a brief description of them so you can find all that stuff in one place so I'd appreciate if you can subscribe to
• 37:30 - 38:00 it it means a lot to me and again it helps grow the channel the other one that I'm subscribed to that I highly suggest is last week in AWS by Corey Quinn this guy's um he's a funny guy he's a Little Bit Sassy if you like a little bit of spice in your um and satire rather a little spice and satire in your dialogue of AWS then this is the the newsletter for you he gives you a lot of interesting let's say interesting perspectives on AWS and this guy you know No Holds
• 38:00 - 38:30 Barred he goes uh pedal to the metal he'll Grill AWS he doesn't work for AWS too so it's a good thing he can say whatever he wants um so that's a good one too um both are links to the respective newsletter so check that out and the next one that I have for you here this one is also extremely um valuable and this is more for more advanced folks like 300 400 series level if you're used to like the certifications world and even if you're not I think there's a lot to learn here so it's called the AWS Builders library and this is a website that has different
• 38:30 - 39:00 articles that are written by principal engineers and above that work in Amazon where they talk about some very interesting and relevant distributed systems and Cloud problems so things like retry policies things like back off and Jitter things like consensus protocols and replication these are more advanced concepts that you may not know in the beginning but if you get to the more advanced levels these are things that you May learn about or be curious about and really really high quality stuff high quality articles lots of
• 39:00 - 39:30 pictures as well to explain to you how things work I read this all the time I can't say more good things about it so kudos to the people that are putting these articles together because it really helps the community and this last tip that I have for you here is a hundred percent the most important in this entire video and it's don't give up and I wanted to put this because I think that a lot of people feel really frustrated when they're trying to learn AWS there's just a lot thrown at them and they don't really have a community or don't really have people to ask questions they get frustrated they think that they can't do it and they get
• 39:30 - 40:00 imposter syndrome like I'm never gonna be able to do this I don't know how to do this I'm never going to be able to figure it out guess what that was me 10 years ago look where I am now I'm a senior engineer at Amazon I've built dozens of AWS services that scale to hundreds of thousands of requests per second so if I can do it then you can do it too and just have some some grit make sure that you can kind of beat through the the barriers beat through the down times and really embrace the good times too because what is life without
• 40:00 - 40:30 celebrating the good times and learning from the bad so I hope you learned something from this video and again I'll put this mind map in the description section so you can come to here and click all the links and again if you like this stuff like the video like the channel subscribe do all the YouTube juice stuff it really helps me out and again thanks so much for watching I hope that you have a really great Cloud journey and this was helpful and yeah I'll see you next time