AWS for Developers 101

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud market leader. It has over 200 services, but you only need to know a handful to get started.

The Big Three

1. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): Virtual machines. It’s like renting a computer in the cloud. You manage the OS and software.
2. S3 (Simple Storage Service): Infinite file storage. Where you dump images, logs, backups, and static websites.
3. RDS (Relational Database Service): Managed SQL databases (Postgres, MySQL). AWS handles backups and patching.

Serverless Power

• Lambda: Run code without provisioning servers. You pay only for the milliseconds your code executes.
• DynamoDB: Managed NoSQL database that scales automatically.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Instead of clicking around the console, professionals use tools to define infrastructure:

• CloudFormation: AWS’s native JSON/YAML format.
• Terraform: The industry standard for multi-cloud IaC.
• AWS CDK: Define infrastructure using TypeScript/Python code!

Conclusion

AWS is vast, but mastering EC2, S3, and Lambda covers 80% of use cases for modern web applications.