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IND 501 · 3 credits
Course Outline
Cloud Computing with AWS
AWS from zero, mental-model-first. Learn what the cloud physically is, then build up the core services in the order real engineers reason about them: identity (IAM), compute (EC2), storage (S3), networking (VPC), managed databases (RDS), and serverless (Lambda). You will practice the decisions, which service to pick, what it costs, and what is misconfigured, without needing a live AWS account, and finish by reading three complete reference architectures.
What you will learn
- ✓Explain what a region, availability zone, and data center actually are, and why companies rent computers instead of buying them
- ✓Reason about IAM users, roles, and policies well enough to spot dangerous permissions before they ship
- ✓Choose between EC2, S3, RDS, and Lambda for a given workload and justify the choice
- ✓Read and debug security groups, subnets, and load balancer setups as diagrams, not console screenshots
- ✓Estimate the monthly cost of a small application and name the free-tier traps that surprise beginners
- ✓Explain three reference architectures end to end: a static site, a classic web app, and a serverless API
Course outline
Unit 1What the cloud actually is
- 1-1Someone else's computer3 checks · 9 min
- 1-2Regions and availability zones3 checks · 10 min
- 1-3Why companies pay for this3 checks · 9 min
Unit 2IAM: identity before servers
- 2-1Accounts, users, and the root user2 checks · 8 min
- 2-2Policies: the permission language4 checks · 12 min
- 2-3Roles: permissions without passwords3 checks · 11 min
Unit 3EC2: renting virtual machines
- 3-1Virtual machines by the hour3 checks · 9 min
- 3-2Getting in: SSH and key pairs3 checks · 10 min
- 3-3Security groups: the instance firewall3 checks · 10 min
Unit 4S3: object storage
- 4-1Buckets, objects, and keys3 checks · 9 min
- 4-2Permissions and static hosting3 checks · 11 min
- 4-3Presigned URLs: temporary access3 checks · 9 min
Unit 5Networking lite: VPCs, subnets, load balancers, DNS
- 5-1Your private slice of the network3 checks · 10 min
- 5-2Public, private, and load balancers2 checks · 10 min
- 5-3Route 53 and DNS: names instead of addresses3 checks · 9 min
Unit 6RDS: managed databases
- 6-1Why "managed" is worth paying for4 checks · 9 min
- 6-2Connecting from EC23 checks · 10 min
- 6-3Read replicas: when one database is not enough3 checks · 9 min
Unit 7Lambda and serverless
- 7-1Functions instead of servers3 checks · 9 min
- 7-2Triggers and events3 checks · 10 min
- 7-3Cold starts, honestly4 checks · 11 min
Unit 8Pricing mental models
- 8-1The four meters4 checks · 9 min
- 8-2Free tier traps and estimating an app4 checks · 12 min
- 8-3Watching the bill: tags, budgets, and Cost Explorer3 checks · 8 min
Unit 9Capstone: three reference architectures
- 9-1Architecture 1: the static site4 checks · 11 min
- 9-2Architecture 2: the classic web app3 checks · 10 min
- 9-3Architecture 3: the serverless API2 checks · 10 min
Practice while you learn
Use Hack University's public online code editor when you want to run code online before committing to the full curriculum. The browser compilers are free for quick syntax checks, exercises, and interview practice in an isolated sandbox environment.