AWS
Personal notes on AWS plus the canonical reference links worth bookmarking.
Working through AWS services as I need them. Each note is a focused page on one thing: what it is, how it works, the gotchas, the way I’ll remember it next time.
Official AWS reference
The canonical first-stop links. Most other “tutorials” you find online lag behind these by months.
- AWS Documentation home — every service, every API.
- AWS Free Tier — what stays free, what flips to billed, expiration windows.
- Well-Architected Framework — the six pillars (operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, sustainability). Read it once even if you skim.
- AWS Architecture Center — reference architectures by use case.
- AWS Builder’s Library — how Amazon itself builds and operates distributed systems. Best free reading on AWS.
- AWS Solutions Library — vetted reference implementations.
Training and certification
- AWS Skill Builder — official free + paid training. The Cloud Practitioner Essentials course is free and a sane on-ramp.
- AWS Training and Certification — cert paths (Cloud Practitioner → Associate → Professional → Specialty).
- AWS Workshops — hands-on labs by service, free, runnable in your own account.
- AWS Cloud Quest — gamified hands-on labs. Useful for muscle memory.
Community and news
- Last Week in AWS (Corey Quinn) — weekly newsletter, no-nonsense commentary on AWS announcements. The shortcut to knowing what changed.
- AWS What’s New — official release feed.
- AWS Blogs — by service / role. The Compute and Architecture blogs are the high-signal ones.
- re:Post — official community Q&A (the new AWS forums).
- aws-samples on GitHub — runnable sample apps. Search before you write.
CLI and SDK reference
- AWS CLI v2 reference — searchable command index.
- boto3 (Python SDK) — most-used SDK; docs are excellent.
- AWS CDK — infrastructure as code in Python/TypeScript/Go.
- Terraform AWS provider — the other dominant IaC path.
Service deep-dives (start here for any service)
- EC2 User Guide — compute, AMIs, instance types, security groups.
- S3 User Guide — object storage, versioning, lifecycle, replication.
- IAM User Guide — identity, policies, roles, STS. Read the policy evaluation logic page twice.
- VPC User Guide — networking. The largest learning curve in AWS.
- Lambda Developer Guide — serverless functions, event sources, runtimes.
- RDS User Guide — managed relational DBs (Postgres, MySQL, etc.).
- DynamoDB Developer Guide — managed NoSQL. The data modeling guide is essential.
- Route 53 Developer Guide — DNS, health checks, routing policies.
- CloudWatch User Guide — metrics, logs, alarms.