Cloud Basics

The Basics of getting started with AWS

What is the cloud?

There are two types of clouds those made mostly of water, and those made mostly of Linux servers, we'll be using the latter. In generally, "the cloud" is just a physical server hosted, paid for, and managed by another entity. Virtualization is used to split the resources a physical server to maximum use, and allows multiple entities to build their products on the same physical devices.

Giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have massive data centers which allow them to promise a higher average uptime than most smaller companies and even individuals to start utilizing their resources for little to no cost.

Why the cloud?

The cloud has little to know upfront costs, automates a lot of otherwise difficult issues, as well as offers an all in one approach making it easy to pivot to new technology or even simply pay for the services or management of something your team may not be prepared to implement themselves.

I firmly believe the cloud is the future and most organizations should move to a hybrid-cloud configuration. The cloud offers more efficiency, reliability, and optimization for the comparable price.

How do I get started with AWS

You can create an account and start creating virtual machines by following the official aws docs.

How to use the aws cli?

The awscli is one of the most powerful tools that AWS has to offer and offers many options that may be unavailable or non-existent within the graphical environment. After you've created an accoutn you can create a user and assign it the permissions you need to perform operations.

After which you'll need to create and grab the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY . You will add these credentials to your machine by running:

aws configure

You'll also have the option to enter the region and default preferred output.