Course Outro: Where to Go After Learning the Cloud Infrastructure Fundamentals

Sam Julien: [0:00] Thanks for coming with me on this guided river tour of AWS for developers. I want to leave you with some places that you can go next and dig in and learn more about AWS. I want to start with some of the services that you're going to encounter immediately after you start going to use things like S3 and EC2 and things like that.

[0:22] The first one is Route 53. Route 53 is basically AWS's DNS provider. The Route 53 dashboard looks like this. You're going to be doing things like setting up domain names and registering domain names and all of that kind of stuff.

[0:39] You're especially going to use this a lot with S3. For example, if you wanted to connect an S3 bucket to a custom domain, you would do that in Route 53. Just remember, Route 53 is for DNS stuff, and you will be fine. That's a place that you're going to want to go next.

[0:57] The other place you're going to want to look at is CloudFront. CloudFront is the content delivery part of AWS. You're going to end up using this quite often to help your content and your websites be available with low latency and around the world and all of that kind of thing. This one's going to come up quite often for you. That is CloudFront. Remember CloudFront for content delivery.

[1:24] The next service I would recommend you check out is called CloudFormation. There are several services in AWS that are meta services. They basically spin up other resources programmatically for you. You don't have to manually go in and create resources like EC2 servers and Lambda functions and all of that. You don't have to do that manually.

[1:44] CloudFormation is the big important one that you will want to look at. CloudFormation is part of something called Infrastructure-as-Code. You might have heard of a software tool called Terraform. That's also an example of Infrastructure-as-Code. This is AWS's Infrastructure-as-Code solution.

[2:04] Essentially, what this means is that you can create these templates that basically tell Amazon, "Hey, I want you to spin up this EC2 instance, and I want you to have this database and create these Lambda functions and these S3 buckets."

[2:18] You can do that all programmatically, which is nice because then you can just repeat those kinds of infrastructure provisions without having to manually click through and make mistakes and that kind of thing. CloudFormation is one that you're going to run into as you get deeper into AWS.

[2:35] Then the last service that I want to point you to is Amplify. As a web developer just doing web development, you're going to love Amplify. Amplify is basically a platform for building full-stack apps quickly. This includes things like components and a CLI tool chain, and even a static hosting services. I very specifically didn't want to cover Amplify in this course because Amplify basically lets you skip everything that we've been covering and go straight to deploying things.

[3:05] There are other resources on Amplify out there, including here on Egghead. I purposely didn't want to go over it because, if you're starting to go into AWS for the purpose of learning things like DevOps and infrastructure and that kind of thing, you're going to want to get to know these services that we've covered through this course.

[3:24] Beyond those services, I mentioned in the very beginning of this course that there are a couple of areas that trip people up. Definitely, you're going to want to dig deeper into the billing and pricing of AWS resources. This is going to be very important for you as you start to get more serious in your AWS usage.

[3:43] Then the other area that I mentioned was identity and access management. You're going to want to learn things about groups and users and roles and security groups and all of that kind of thing. The billing and the IAM stuff, you're going to have to learn, no matter what. I want to give you a heads-up that that's going to be something that you're going to need to work through.

[4:03] That can be frustrating because it's not code that you're working with or resources that you're working with, it's the administrative side. Hopefully, at your company, you've got some people who manage that kind of thing for you. As you're learning for either your own knowledge or for certifications, you're going to need to know that stuff.

[4:20] Speaking of certifications, there are a number of different certifications you can get for AWS. First and foremost, the very first certification that you're going to get is called the Cloud Practitioner exam.

[4:32] It's considered the foundational exam, and it's recommended for people who have at least six months of fundamental AWS knowledge. It's high level. It's not super technical. I personally didn't think it was that easy. It was easy as tests go, but it's not a walk in the park. There's a lot of stuff that you need to remember for the Cloud Practitioner.

[4:54] With that, that ends our Cloud Infrastructure Fundamentals course here on Egghead. I just wanted to say thank you for sticking with me and dipping your toes in to the AWS river. If you need anything, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @samjulien. I also write a ton of stuff at my website, samjulien.com, so reach out. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.