Getting Started with AWS

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a rent-a-computer-and-more service. Instead of buying servers, you rent them by the second.

The two words to know first

• Region — a geographic area where AWS has data centres (Mumbai = ap-south-1, N. Virginia = us-east-1).
• Availability Zone (AZ) — an isolated data centre inside a region. Every region has at least 2 AZs so your app survives one going down.

Region (ap-south-1)
+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|  AZ ap-south-1a |  AZ ap-south-1b |  AZ ap-south-1c |
|   [DC 1]        |   [DC 2]        |   [DC 3]        |
+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+

Free tier

AWS gives freshers a 12-month free tier — enough for one small EC2 VM, 5GB of S3, 750 hours of DynamoDB and a lot more. Perfect for learning.

• Always set a billing alarm in CloudWatch for $1 so you never get surprised.

The console

The AWS Console is a huge web UI at https://console.aws.amazon.com. To not get lost:

1. Pick your region (top-right) — services are region-specific.
2. Use the search bar at the top; don't try to memorize 200 service names.
3. Star (favourite) the 4-5 services you use every day.

Real-world tip

Beginners usually create their infrastructure in the wrong region and forget where they put it. Always check the top-right region indicator before creating anything.