Getting Started

0:00Well hello there and welcome my name is Scott Fletcher and this is the AWS certified data engineer associate course. Now whether you're a grizzled veteran data commando who wants to learn this new fangled AWS thingy or maybe you're a seasoned AWS pro looking to add some data engineering skills to your toolbox you are in the right place. In this course we're going to take a deep dive into the world of AWS and data engineering we're going to talk about everything from storage solutions to big data processing to advanced analytics we'll even sprinkle on a little bit of machine learning because what self-respecting internet video isn't complete without their grat uitous use of machine learning. Anyway in this first skill I'm going to give you some course information and expectations then to round things out we're going to create an AWS account that will be our very own data engineering lab. Let's get started.

0:00All right, let's get this party started. Now, sometimes when I'm speaking to you, I'm going to be full screen like this. Sometimes I'm going to be a little picture down here in the corner. Sometimes I'm just going to be lurking in the shadows like this. And so let me go picture in picture here. And let's talk about the AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Exam. The first thing that we should know about this particular exam is that they expect you to have a certain amount of experience.

0:33This is not an introductory exam, nor is it an introductory course. So they expect you to have somewhere between two and three years of experience with data and between one and two years of hands-on with AWS. Now, I understand that there are different degrees of hands-on because if you do the same job every day for two years, working with one and only one service, then that's going to be a much different experience than if you've worked with 17 different services on AWS.

1:06So just take that with a grain of salt. Really, what I'm after here is I would suggest that if you, if I used sentences like this, let's use our ETL tool to convert that CSV data into JSON format. If that makes sense to you, then you're probably okay. If that sounds like a totally different foreign language, then you might want to back up and try some more introductory type stuff. If I say structured, unstructured, unstructured, or semi-structured data, if that makes sense to you, then again, you probably are on the right track.

1:43If that is totally foreign to you, then maybe you might want to back up and reconsider some more introductory stuff. Now, if I put up a statement like this, if you can understand this and know what this is saying, then I think you're not going to have any problems whatsoever. If on the other hand, you're looking at this and saying, what in the world does this mean, then yeah, this may be a bit much of a course for you. So I am going to go back into the shadows right now.

2:14We're going to go on to the next slide here and talk about the exam itself. Now, the exam itself is a multiple choice or multiple response. Multiple choice is just have a question and then you have maybe five different options there and you have a little radio button and you can select one of those five different options. Multiple response is slightly different because you can actually select multiple responses. So there'll be little check boxes and they'll ask you which of the following pick three are the right choice and you can check, check, check, check, that sort of thing.

2:49Now, there are 50 scored questions and 50 unscored questions. Why in the world would they put unscored questions on an exam? Well, the exam writers are continually trying to write new questions for the exam bank, but it's a little bit unfair for them to write questions and then just put them out there in the test data bank and maybe the question has a wording error. Maybe it's a little confusing. Maybe it's a little controversial, something like that. They beta test these questions before they actually get minted into the test database.

3:25So you may see some questions out there that are a little bit strange or maybe they cover some sort of cutting edge service that just was released a few weeks ago and this is probably what those questions are. Now, one of the questions that I get all the time is that, hey, there's a new service that was just released last week. Do I need to worry about it being on the exam? The answer is no, you don't because AWS says that a service has to be generally available for at least six months before it will show up on an exam as a scored question.

4:00So don't worry about the services that just drop from the sky. They may show up as an unscored question while they're trying to build a question data bank about that particular service, but it's not going to be scored so don't sweat it if you get it wrong. Now, a passing score is 720 out of 1,000. Now, what constitutes 720? Is it 72% of the questions? No, not at all. It's kind of a mystery how they actually score things. They keep that to themselves to really account for the fact that no two test t akers are going to get these same identical tests because they have this giant question bank and the questions are different levels of difficulty and they cover different things.

4:43And so they kind of use the scaling factor behind the scenes to try to figure out and make it fair for test takers. So now that we've talked a little bit about the exam itself, in the next video, I wanted to kind of explain my learning philosophy and how we're going to attack getting you to the point where you're going to feel comfortable getting in there and sitting for this data engineering associate exam.

0:00Okay, one of the things that I fully recognize about anybody that's taking this course is that we all have different learning journeys. We're coming from different places. There may be some folks who just have a love of learning and they want to go out there and just learn all the things. There may be some folks who are taking this course because they want career advancement. They want to raise or promotion or they want to move themselves into a data engineering career from some other career job.

0:32Now there are others out there that may be curious or maybe they're skeptical. They've heard about this AWS thing and all this data engineering and data management that AWS can do and they're wanting to learn a little bit more about that. That's kind of how I got into machine learning as a matter of fact. I was skeptical. I was trying to figure out what is all this stuff about. It's not magic. Well, no, it's not magic. And that's how I got into that. So I can appreciate if you're skeptical or just curious. Now there are other folks who have been volunteered to take this course and I sympathize with that as well.

1:10Maybe your organization has decided to move to AWS or move your data warehouse to AWS and it's part of the process that we make sure that everybody in the organization or at least everybody that's involved in that transition is up-skilled enough so that you know what you're doing. And I think that's very respectable. But I also understand that some may see this course as a bit of a chore. So what I would say to that is just bear with me. This is not your traditional course. I do not have a traditional sage on the stage type teaching style.

1:44I'm more of a guide on the side. So hopefully you'll see that come through as we go through this course. Now I wanted to introduce something else to you. This is called Bloom's Taxonomy. And this is something that is useful when we're trying to figure out how we want to try to attack things or how we want to learn new things. The base here is remember. That's all about memorization. You just develop the ability to just recall facts. Now on top of that, the next level up in complexity and sophistication from a learning standpoint is being able to understand things.

2:19You can explain things or concepts. Now above that is apply. Now once we understand things, it makes sense that we need to be able to apply them to certain things. Now in this course, we are going to try to focus on this apply step here. Now one of the things in the AWS data engineer blueprint that they say is specifically out of scope is the ability to analyze stuff with the data that we're going to be manipulating and moving around.

2:51Now basically that would be the next step up here being able to take that data and make business decisions out of it. They specifically say that's not really the purpose or the scope of this certification, which I can completely understand. What our intent here is I want to get you to the point where you can apply these concepts to build data pipelines or data cleansing processes or stuff like that that will help you build what you need to do to have your data engineering processes work smoothly on AWS.

3:27So to that end, we're not going to spend a whole lot of time on memorization or the understanding aspect. What I'm going to do is I'm going to present stuff to you and then we're going to work through it using a series of challenges. And once we get to the first challenge, I'll show you how they're going to work . But the idea there is they let you kind of choose your own path, choose your own level of difficulty. And hopefully you're going to choose the most difficult level because I think that's the most fun and you're going to learn the most.

3:58But it's a little bit adjustable based on your level. So if we look at the certification family of AWS, here we have the data engineering associate. So it is a mid tier certification. The entry level is a cloud practitioner. And some of these more advanced ones are stuff that you would take after you take probably some of these mid tier items here. So we are not going to be talking about ultra advanced stuff. But if it's new to you, then it's going to be pretty challenging, I'm sure.

4:31So you enrolled in this course, you're going to get a certification. Great. Does a certification mean that you know this stuff? Is it proof of knowledge? Well, no. Many, many people who are brilliant, but in an exam environment, they just crumble. And maybe that's you too. Now, conversely, I've met some people who have loads of certifications, but in a practical setting, they couldn't figure their way out of a wet paper bag on AWS. So just so we're on the same page, I do not think that certifications equal proof of knowledge, not at all.

5:08But I really rather I see them as a framework for learning. They set out a framework that you can kind of study or learn or progress towards. And that sitting for the exam isn't the finale. That's just a checkpoint in that process of learning. So to summarize here, memorize versus understand, apply and analyze. I most definitely want us to focus on the understand, apply and analyze. Now, certification is going to help keep us focused because let's be frank, there are a ton of things out on AWS that you can kind of squirrel rabbit hole down.

5:49But there are things on the exam blueprint that specifically say, hey, this is in scope, this is out of scope. And those guardrails are going to help us stay focused. And I also want to convey the fact that I believe that this is greater than just passing an exam. Sure, you can pass an exam. There are a lot of great test takers that can pass an exam, but does that really mean they truly understand what they're doing? Probably not. Now, in a lot of cases in this course, we're going to be talking about scenario based activity.

6:20So I'm going to build out a scenario and you're going to have to work your way through that scenario. So that is how we're going to kind of sidestep this whole memorization stuff and really focus in on this understand, apply. And maybe not so much analyze in this particular course, but certainly apply and understand. So how are we going to do these things? Well, in this course, obviously we're going to have an audio visual component says Mr. Obvious, but the adept learning platform, that's the platform you're taking this course on right now has some other features as well.

6:56And I'm going to include some text, sometimes for clarification, sometimes for reinforcement. And sometimes it's just going to be a complete non sequit, sequiter to keep things interesting. Now occasionally I might, I might direct you to specific AWS resources such as a YouTube video or a blog article that I found particularly helpful. We also have quiz questions throughout the skill. Some of these questions are designed to be very similar to exam questions to get you in the practice of doing those.

7:29As a matter of fact, at the end of every skill, we are going to have a validation section that's going to consist of some quiz questions that mimic or look like AWS exam questions. And I'm going to present them to you. I'm going to ask you to do your best to try to answer those. And then at the end of that, I'm going to have a video walking through those questions, not only to kind of reveal the answer, but also share with you my strategy of how I can try to simplify those questions and improve our odds of getting the right answer.

8:04Now another thing about this course is I do believe one of the best ways to learn is just roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and go make some mistakes. In some skills, I'll step through an activity on AWS and you can follow along if you wish. Additionally, there are going to be other skills that I'm going to have a challenge for you. And these are kind of real world modeled scenarios where you can decide the level of difficulty. And I mentioned that earlier in this video and we'll explain that more once we get to our first challenge.

8:36So what are some other ways that you can accelerate your learning? Well, one of the ways that I found is pretty useful. If you happen to be taking this course with colleagues, maybe you just all take it together and you have a group study session. Maybe you do a lunch and learn or something like that where you watch a video session and then you challenge each other to do the challenges and compare notes after that. I've seen other people make flashcards. Again, that's more of the memorization thing, but sometimes that can be useful to help you make associations.

9:07Yes, the AWS docs are quite good. And although I generally don't like reading documentation at all, whenever I want to truly understand something, guess what? I go to the AWS docs. Now, they also have some little key pieces of information in there and I'll point those out when we go through those things. Sometimes there are things in the documentation that are called out specifically and those are good fertile ground for ending up on exam questions because AWS believes that you really need to know that thing and I'll point some out as we see those.

9:42And also talk to folks, talk to folks who have been there, done that. Folks who are experienced on AWS or experienced in data engineering just talk to them and they're always most in most cases, they're always happy to share their experiences and how it got to where they are and what they wish they would have done differently and so forth and so on. So by the end of this course, I would hope that you're going to become familiar with common data engineering strategies and concepts, especially when they relate to AWS and the AWS platform.

10:15You should be hip to the AWS lingo at least in the data engineering space. You should also know about some of the best practices and the potential danger zones that AWS wants us to know about to make sure we don't do something bad. Now of course, I want you to be able to smash that AWS certified data, data engineer associate exam, but also I want you to be able to help somebody else start their own cloud journey because one of the important things that we have as learners going through the learning process is once we learn something, it's very helpful and useful to be able to help teach that to somebody else because that not only helps them, but it helps us because it helps us solidify that information.

10:59I'm sure you've heard the saying C1, do one, teach one, that is a really powerful learning mechanism. [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00All right, for the remainder of this skill, we are going to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty. We are going to get into the AWS console. But before we get into the AWS console, we're going to have to create an account. Now, I understand you may be starting with maybe a company that already has accounts for you to use. Do not use a production account for doing stuff in this course. It's going to create a big mess. And you could actually get in trouble security wise by doing that. What I would recommend is create a special account all by yourself. Maybe if your organization wants to create an account for you like a sandbox account, where you can pretty much do everything, you will need to have administrator access into this account to do some of the activities that we're going to do in this course. So my recommendation is just create an account from scratch. You're going to be in the free tier for the most for most of the services that we're going to use, they probably fall within the free tier, or at least they're just pennies to use that sort of thing.

0:58So just go ahead and go out there and then create an account. And then you don 't have to worry about inadvertently exposing your company's secrets to the internet or something like that. So let's get started. So to create our account, we're going to go out to AWS.amazon.com. And this is AWS's main web page. Now your screen may look different. These advertisements and promotions they have going here tend to change. So if your screen looks different, then don't worry about it too much.

1:29What we're most interested here is this button up here. This is create an AWS account. I'm going to click on that. And it's going to take me to a sign up page, or at least the first part of the sign up page. So if I have an existing account, I can already sign into that there. But I am going to set up a new account. So right here at this first screen, let me enlarge it a little bit. We're being asked for a root user email address. Now this root user is the most powerful user in our AWS account. It's going to be the first user in our account. It's going to be the most powerful.

2:06It has the ability to do basically everything inside that account. It's not best practice to use this root user to do a lot of stuff with because it's so powerful and it's easy to make a mistake with this root user. So best practices say we should use another account and we'll get into that later. But for right now, we're being asked for a root user. Now this can be your own email address. This can be an alias. This can be an email address that forwards to some other location. It does need to be a real deliverable email address because when you sign up, they're going to send you information and confirmations and your monthly invoice to this email address.

2:45So I'm going to enter this email address here. It's got pleasure plus cloud practice at cbtnuggets.com. That is going to go to my email address or an email address box that I have access to. Next, we're being asked to provide an account name. Now this account name can be really anything you want, but it does have to be unique amongst other account names. So it may take a little trial and error to try to figure out the best account name here. So I'm going to try Fletcher cloud practice. We're going to verify that email address. And what this is going to do is send an email to this address here and make sure it's a real address. And so now I have to go check my email box in it's asking me to put in a verification code. So let me do that. I do have my verification code that I just received it is this 903 and verify. And so it has verified that our email address is in fact a real email address. Now we're being asked for our root password. Now because this root user is the most powerful in our entire account, we should use a pretty complex root password that's not easy to guess. Because if it's easy to guess, somebody could get into your account and do bad stuff. So I'm going to enter a password here that tries to

4:02satisfy these conditions here has to have some uppercase letters, some lowercase letters, numbers, and some non alphanumeric characters. And I have to enter it in here again to confirm. And then it's saying, hey, we can continue on to the next step. So we're going to click that. Now we 're being asked how we're going to use our account, either it's business or personal. I'm just going to select personal here. And it's going to ask for who should we contact about this account. This is our contact information. So I'm going to put my stuff in here. And I'm going to fill out my phone number and address and postal code and all that stuff. And then I'm going to check this little box down here that says, yes, I have read and agreed to the terms of service. I would encourage you if you're concerned about these types of things, do read through the terms of service, there are certain things in here that you cannot do you are confirming that you agree that you cannot do certain things.

5:00Those certain things are stuff that you probably wouldn't do anyway, like use the AWS account to launch attacks on other accounts or other companies or send viruses and stuff like that. That's kind of crazy stuff. It also says that you agree to pay your bills. So I am going to fill out all this information. And then I'm going to progress to the next screen. Now I've progressed to the next screen and is asking for my billing information. And there's a note here that says we will not charge you for usage below the free tier limits. But we may temporarily hold up a $1 USD or equivalent as a pending transaction just to verify that this is indeed a valid credit card number. So I am going to enter my credit card number information here and then progress to the next screen.

5:48Okay, after I entered my credit card details, I progressed to the next screen and it's asking me to confirm my identity. I can do it two ways. I can have them text me or call me. And I'm going to have them text me. I'm going to enter my mobile phone number here. I have to do this little capture phrase here to prove that I'm not a robot, I guess. And then I can click on send SMS. So let me do that now. Okay, so I've just entered my phone number information and the little capture code.

6:18I'm going to check my phone here. And sure enough, I do have a text. And let me enter that code here. There we go. And I can continue. Now it's prompting us for what sort of support plan we want to sign up for. Now, because this is just a learning account, we can stick with basic support. That's more or less just email support. You're pretty much going to be at the bottom of the queue. Now, if you want a level up from that, you can get developer support from $29 a month, or you can get business support from $100 a month. Now, if you are a business who intends on running workloads on top of AWS, I highly recommend you go with at least the business support level support.

7:03Because if you happen to be running mission critical applications or applications that are critical for your business to function, then you definitely don't want to be waiting around for somebody to eventually get to your support question. So this is going to give you some priority response time here. And it has some other benefits too. But for now, we're just going to use basic support. And I'm going to complete the side up. Congratulations. Thank you for signing up with AWS. Now, we can go to the AWS management console. We can click on this button right here .

7:38It's going to prompt us for logging in. And we have two options. We have a root user, which is the user that we just created. And then we also have something called an I am user. And we're going to talk about that in a later skill. But for now, if we want to log in, we can just put our root user name right here. And then I can click next, and it's going to prompt me for my password, and click sign in. And then that is going to allow us to get into our AWS console.

0:00Alright, now we have our AWS account. We're ready to roll, right? Well, we have a few more things to do. First and foremost, we need to put multi-factor authentication on our root account. Now, I happen to use UB keys. You can also use a little device like this that gives you a little number here that you would enter one time password, that sort of thing. You can also use an application. If you have like Bitwarden or LastPass or something like that, we are going to put multi- factor authentication on our root user because that root user is the most important user in our account. And if that gets compromised, we are in trouble. So we are going to do that first and foremost. Next, we are going to create an IAM user for our daily use. It's bad practice to use our root user for everything because it's just too powerful. We don't need it. We're going to create an IAM user for that purpose. We're also going to put multi-factor authentication on that I AM user, of course, just use multi-factor authentication always just. It shouldn't be even negot iable. Okay.

1:10So the other thing we're going to do is we are going to enable CloudTrail. And I'll explain what CloudTrail is. If you already know, then you know, and we are also going to enable an AWS budget. And that is going to be very important because it's going to make sure that if we accidentally leave something on, we're not going to be surprised by this gargantuan bill at the end of the month. So these are some things that I recommend that everybody do whenever they create a new account. So let's go. So one of the things that I do want to share with you right now is for our root account user, we most definitely want to turn it on something called multi- factor authentication.

1:53And you probably use this in your own personal accounts with maybe your bank or your employer, where you have to enter your username and password. And then maybe they challenge you to enter another code that an app provides for you, or maybe they text you an SMS message and you have to enter that code. That is multi-factor authentication. And so we most definitely want to add that to our root user, because again, that root user is the most powerful user in our entire account. So it's given us this warning here, how I got here is I went to this little dropdown clicked on security credentials. It took me to this screen. And I went to assign an MFA. Now we have an option of several different types of FFA's. We can use an authenticator app that's something like, I don't know, LastPass Bitwarden Duo, I think also does this to where you can specify that you want to store your code generator, your one time password code generator in some sort of authentication app. We also have a security key, which is a hardware key. And examples of this are UB keys or other FIDO security keys. I'm partial to UB keys. I use UB keys for as many

3:13accounts as I can, and as many places as I can, because I just like the ease of use. And they're extremely secure. And we also have a hardware token down here. Now this is a bit old school, but you may still have these. You can buy these little tokens that have this little LCD screen, and you press a button, and it shows you a code here. And you can enter that code into the AWS login process here when we're logging in, and it will allow you through. Now for our purposes, I'm going to use an authenticator app just because I think that's probably the most common way that you're probably going to have to create a multi factor authentication. Now if you don't have an application to do this, you can download one pretty easily. I think Microsoft has one, Google, I know has one, basically any sort of password manager will probably have the ability here.

4:05Like I said, last pass bit warden, those things. So I am going to say, let's see, bit warden , because that's the password manager that I use. And I'm going to choose authenticator app. And so I'm going to click next. Now it offers me the option here to show a QR code. And if I have this application on my mobile device, then I can just easily scan this QR code here. And if I don't have that ability, I can show my secret key. And this secret key right here, I would copy and paste and put into my password manager. And then it's going to challenge me to enter these two consecutive codes to MFA device codes. And this just synchronizes my device, my the codes that my device is generating with what AWS is keeping up with my device. And it uses the secret code, plus there's a time function as well. So I'm going to scan this QR code with my bit warden mobile account here. And I'm going to save it. Oops. Okay, I've saved it. Now I can go back out and pull that back up. And it is providing me with a one time password . So I'm going to enter that. And then I'm going to wait until it generates a new one, and then enter

5:23that as well. And just in case you're on the security side of things, and you're saying, how dare he show his MFA code? Isn't that dangerous? Well, as soon as I record this video, I'm going to delete this particular MFA code and change it to something else. So in addition, probably by the time this course gets published, this account is going to be long gone anyway, because I cycle through accounts very readily. So I'm going to enter my second one time password there, add MFA. Okay , so I can register up to eight MFA's. And I would really recommend if you have the opportunity to enter multiple MFA's, especially if you're using a hardware MFA, they could potentially get lost.

6:06Then it's always good to have a backup. So here my multi factor authentication is enabled. And next time when I log in, well, after I enter my password, it's going to prompt me for this one time password. So that is something that you must do. Again, you know, it is optional. But these are some of the best practices that people do. And those that do these things don't end up on front page news about having all their AWS data stolen or compromised. So we have to do the best practices, we have to follow those best practices.

0:00Okay, so here I am back in my live account and first things we're going to do is turn on cloud trail. So we can go up here search for cloud trail and there it is. Now, because I'm using control tower and AWS organizations, both those services are really beyond the scope of this particular course. But I had created this account using those services and they have already created trails for me. What is cloud trail? Well, cloud trail, I kind of think of it as like, it's a security camera, it's the eye in the sky that sees everything, every API interaction that somebody anybody has with this particular account, it is going to register in cloud trail.

0:41And that's very useful. If for instance, you have some sort of security event or you have a data breach, then you can use these cloud trail logs to try to do some forensics and try to figure out how much data did they get? What did they get? That sort of thing. So I already have my trails set up now if you set up your account as a standalone, you probably don't have these here. So we're just going to go here to create trail. And I'm going to call it something, let 's just call it data engineering trail. And it's going to ask if we want to create a new S3 bucket or an existing S3 bucket. Now I'm just going to leave it here to create new bucket, it's going to create a new bucket with this name here. Now, normally speaking, you probably would just leave this enabled here, this log file SSE KMS encryption. What this is is using KMS key management service to encrypt the logs when they get written to that bucket. Now, you would probably think at least best practices would say that yeah, sure, encrypt everything at rest. Well, the problem that this creates is that every time an API is registered, it's going to go out and write that to S3. And it's going to call KMS to encrypt that piece of data. Well, every call to KMS ends up costing a tiny

2:02bit of money, but it really adds up over time. So I am going to uncheck this. This is just a sandbox account. I'm not very interested in making sure it's encrypted. If you were using this in a live account, probably somebody who have already set up these things for you would have already taken care of that. You don't have to worry about that. But I'm just going to uncheck it. Now down here, log file validation, I don't really care about that. And don't really care about SNS, I'm going to leave all that the same. I'm going to click next. Okay, now it's asking me what types of events do I want to record? Now I could select data events, and I can go down here to data events. And I can select the actual service and is going to log those particular data events.

2:47What is a data event? Well, that's anytime data is written or read or modified. So if we're talking Lambda, for example, or DynamoDB, then that's going to record all events if we choose to or only read only events or write only events. That's a lot of stuff. So we're not going to do that right now. I'm going to un select data events. I'm really more interested in management events. Those are events like logs and log ins, log outs, account creations, that sort of thing. And I'm going to click next. And it's going to give me a little confirmation here. I'm cool with all that stuff. And my trail is created . So that's all I have to do. I have created this little trail here, we can click on this. And it 's going to take us out to that S three buckets. And here it is created a cloud trail. And it takes a little while to populate some data in there. So we can check back on that later. As a matter of fact, one of the things that we're going to do as part of this course is use cloud trail to monitor some of the API access to our data services. Okay, so that is enabling cloud trail. Now the very next thing I want you to do is go out and set up a budget. So you don't get surprised by overspending. So we're going to go to billing and cost management. And we are going to scroll down

4:07here to budgets. And there's our here's our budget. We're going to create a budget. Now we have some options here, we can use this simplified template that's already provided here, or we can customize our budget. I'm going to use a template here. Now we can choose zero budget. That would basically mean if we spend over a penny, it's going to alert us and say, Hey, you spent over $0. And that's pretty useful if you want to be sure that you're sticking with the free tier. I always find that to be very, very difficult, especially with some of the services that I end up using, they do cost money sometimes, but they're just pennies. So I'm going to use a monthly cost budget.

4:49And I'm going to leave that name the same here. And I'm just going to say 50 bucks. If I spend over 50 bucks, then it's going to notify me. And now I have to enter what my email recipient is. And that's going to be my, my account here. There we go. And I'm going to click create budget. That's it. That's all you have to do walk away. You now have a budget. Now the last thing that we have to do is we want to create an I am user that we're going to use on a daily basis, because we do not want to use our root user for any more than we absolutely have to. Now I am going to go out to I am identity and access management. Hopefully in your experience with AWS, you should have a little experience with AWS. I am is kind of one of those core services that it's hard to miss. So I am is going to be something that we're going to see in this course a little bit.

5:46So I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time describing exactly what it is. You should already know that. But we will dive into some of the roles and policies and so forth. So I'm going to create a user. I'm going to call this Scott. And I want to provide user access to the AWS management console. Yes. And it's going to ask me I can enter a custom password or can auto generate a password. I'm going to enter my own password here. And then it's going to ask should the user create a new password at next sign in I'm going to uncheck that because I am me. I just created my password. That's a password I want. Click next. No, don't say now I'm going to have the option here to add this user to a group. And well, I think that's a pretty good idea. I'm going to create a group. And I'm going to create a group with administrator access. So we can scroll out here.

6:40You can see we have different administrator access groups for some different services. This is kind of the top level administrator access. And for the activities that we're going to be doing in this course, you will need administrative access. So I'm just going to check that one and click create a group. Oops, got to give it a name administrators. Create a group. There we go. And now I can select that group and say I want to become a member of that group. My username, a member of that group create user. Now, of course, what I would want to do is immediately set up multi factor authentication on this account as well. So I'm going to basically repeat the process enable without multi factor.

7:27And it's given me a little warning here it says, come on, come on. So I'm going to go to security credentials, scroll down here to multi factor authentication, and rinse and repeat the same process that I've already done. I am sure that you can figure this out. So there we have it. We have implemented our account. We have secured the root user with MFA. We have added a budget alert. And we have also turned on cloud trail. We have also created a daily driver user in our individual user. And from now on, we're going to use this user to log into our console.

8:05And we are basically We're going to forget about our root user because we don't need it.

0:00Now at the end of every skill, I'm going to have three questions and they're going to simulate exam questions and I do this for two reasons. Number one, just to try to reinforce what we learned in the skill and number two, taking AWS exam questions is a bit of an art and a science. And there are some tips and tricks that can help you really increase your chances of getting that question right, even if you're a little bit shaky on the subject matter of the question itself. So I'm going to kind of show you how I walk through these questions. Now, because this is a first skill in our course, there's not a whole lot of meat on the bone, so to speak.

0:36So our questions here are kind of lighthearted, but I still wanted to walk through them just to give you an idea of what to expect at the end of every skill. So here we go. First question, which of the following are best practices after creating new AWS accounts? Choose four. Well, we have a couple of different ways we can approach this. We can choose four or because there's only one, two, three, four, five options here. We can just find one that's clearly not the answer and the rest of them have to be the answer. So we can look down through here and able clown trail.

1:07Yep, I want to do that. Enable MFA on root users. Yep, create a budget. Yep, create an IAM user rather than user root user. Yep, I should do that crack open a cold beverage and watch Simpsons reruns. I would love to do that as a best practice, but alas, AWS doesn't think that that's a best practice when creating a new account. So if we were going about it a different way, we could just find that option right there. Say that's not one. Here's all the rest of them. And so this is my final answer moving right along.

1:39What purpose does Amazon cloud trail serve for our account? Number one, it protects our account from denial of service attacks. No, it doesn't really protect us from anything. If you remember, cloud trail records stuff, as a matter of fact, here's the answer. Records all API calls coming in and out of our account. That's exactly what cloud trail does. Does it provide a way for us to log in using a federated account management? Nope, it does not do that. Does it ensure that accounts only have access to the stuff they're supposed to have?

2:11No, it does not do that. So this answer right here is my final answer moving right along. What is a key strategy to improve your chances of selecting the correct answer in an exam? Relying solely on memory? Nope. Guessing only randomly? No, I wouldn't say that focusing on only on familiar topics. Well, you were going to have exam questions that you are not familiar with. So that's probably not a good strategy as well. Approaching exam questions with an art and a science.

2:44Yes. Which is a good answer in my opinion. Skipping difficult questions. No, that's not a really good strategy. However, one of the things I do recommend for exam takers is that you make a single pass, a first pass through all the questions and kind of get a lay of the land. And any questions that you can immediately answer, go ahead and answer those. Any questions that are giving you a little bit of difficulty, mark them and come back. But I do not recommend just totally skipping them and pretending they don't exist. So we'll get into that in later skills and I'll show you how I walk through my exam questions.

3:19So I hope this has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing.