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Learn the Cloud. For free.

Learn the Cloud is a targeted site meant to take a very specific path to being competent in the cloud. It is a very hands-on, project-heavy path that uses specific tools and teaches specific strategies to use those tools. If you’re looking for a broad introduction to AWS and a wide selection of options, this site may not be for you. However, if you’re looking for a fast and efficient path to AWS competence, that uses only the most sought-after skills to get the job done, with little overhead and no unessential knowledge included, then this site is for you.

Learn the Cloud also believes in iteration to success, which, put simply, means that the more you do a single lesson, the better and more comfortable you will be. To this end, almost all of our lessons are repeatable, and we provide explicit instructions for starting over from scratch. We suggest you do just this as much as you need to become comfortable with the content! You never need to know more than we give you at any point, but you should know what is in the lesson well before moving on to the next one.

Good luck Learning the Cloud!!

What will I learn? What do I need to start?

What is AWS?

To understand what AWS is, you need to understand at a very basic level what the cloud is. In the past, if you wanted to host something on the internet or perform any kind of computing task, you’d need to buy, set up, and maintain your own computer or server cluster. The cloud is a way to hand much of the management of your servers off to someone else. It is a way for you to buy or rent computing power that's managed by someone else. That way, if you want to host a website, run some code, or you have any other computing need and you don’t want to buy and maintain your own servers to do so, you can just rent from a cloud provider. The cloud provider is often responsible for buying, setting up, and maintaining all the servers you’ll need for any computing task. You just have to pay to use some of their resources.

AWS is the largest cloud provider, and stands for Amazon Web Services. AWS offers hundreds of different ways to do things in the cloud, often completely managed by them. You just have to have an idea of what you want to do on a server, and AWS will help you host it., for a fee.

In the context of AWS, servers are just computers owned by AWS that you can rent. It gets more complicated than this through advanced practices like virtualization and containerization, but as a beginning concept you can think of a server as kind of like your home computer, but in the cloud, ready for you to use.

That being said, AWS is very large, and with hundreds of advanced features, it can be very difficult to use AWS resources correctly. That’s why companies who want to use AWS often pay or hire a cloud engineer to help them. Cloud, and specifically AWS, engineers are people who are trained in the best-practice use of AWS resources.

This website aims to help anyone who wants to become an AWS engineer, perpetually free of charge. It’s a very lucrative but challenging field, and the exact knowledge you need to succeed in it is scattered throughout the internet and often difficult to find. With this site, our goal is to help people get from zero cloud experience to the ability to build and host solutions on AWS and ultimately get hired.

Why AWS?

From their website, “Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.”

AWS provides companies and businesses a way to host their apps, services, and data securely, reliably, and cost-effectively without the need for their own physical servers. AWS has servers all over the world that companies use, all accessed via the cloud/internet.

Read through AWS’ Fundamentals Course for more information.

You will learn:

  • git - a popular and almost universally used version control tool
  • Node.js - a popular backend programming language built on javascript
  • Terraform - an Infrastructure as Code tool used to build scalable and reusable solutions in the AWS cloud
  • Serverless Framework - a framework to make interaction with AWS Lambda and APIs easy and reusable
  • Docker - a containerization tool used for deploying many services to the cloud
  • Knowledge of many AWS resources and services, including:
    • VPCs - subnets, security groups, internet and NAT gateways, IP addresses, etc
    • EC2
    • Autoscaling, load balancing, and target groups
    • IAM
    • ECS
    • Route 53
    • KMS
    • S3
    • CICD
    • RDS
    • Lambda
    • API Gateway
  • To implement all of the above services (and more!) into projects you can store and save for when you’re on the job hunt and need something to impress!