Lesson 1: AWS Foundations, Well-Architected Design, IAM, Networking, and Compute

Topics Covered

• AWS Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations, global services, and service-resilience boundaries
• Cloud architecture principles and the six AWS Well-Architected pillars
• AWS accounts, shared responsibility, AWS Organizations, organizational units, and multi-account strategy
• IAM users, groups, roles, policies, federation, temporary credentials, and least-privilege access
• VPC CIDR planning, public and private subnets, route tables, internet gateways, NAT gateways, and VPC endpoints
• Security groups, network ACLs, traffic-flow analysis, logging, and layered network protection
• Amazon EC2, AMIs, instance families, EBS, EFS, FSx, pricing models, and AWS Lambda foundations

Practical Activity

• Create a reference architecture with separate public, application, and data subnets across multiple Availability Zones.
• Define IAM roles and policies for administrators, applications, and operations teams using least privilege.
• Compare EC2, containers, and Lambda for a sample workload and document the decision criteria.

Lesson Outcome

Learners can design and explain a secure AWS account, identity, network, and compute foundation using Well-Architected decision principles.