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Getting Started with AWS - A Complete Beginner's Guide

· 2 min read
Goel Academy
Goel Academy
DevOps & Cloud Learning Hub

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform. In this guide, we'll cover the fundamentals you need to get started.

What is AWS?​

AWS offers over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. It provides a mixture of:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - EC2, VPC
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) - WorkMail, Chime

Core Services to Learn First​

1. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)​

EC2 provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud. Here's how to launch your first instance:

# Using AWS CLI to launch an EC2 instance
aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id ami-0abcdef1234567890 \
  --instance-type t2.micro \
  --key-name MyKeyPair \
  --security-group-ids sg-903004f8 \
  --subnet-id subnet-6e7f829e

2. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)​

S3 is object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere.

# Create a bucket
aws s3 mb s3://my-first-bucket

# Upload a file
aws s3 cp myfile.txt s3://my-first-bucket/

# List bucket contents
aws s3 ls s3://my-first-bucket/

3. IAM (Identity and Access Management)​

IAM enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "s3:GetObject",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::my-bucket/*"
    }
  ]
}

Best Practices​

  1. Enable MFA on your root account
  2. Use IAM roles instead of access keys when possible
  3. Enable CloudTrail for auditing
  4. Set up billing alerts to avoid surprise charges
  5. Use tags to organize and track resources

Next Steps​

This is the first post in our AWS series. Stay tuned for deep dives into EC2, S3, Lambda, and more!