Getting Started with Amazon Web Services

0:00Well hello there and welcome. My name is Scott Fletcher and this is the AWS certified cloud practitioner course. Now while that might seem like a mouthful, another name for this course could easily be the absolute beginner's guide to all things Amazon Web Services . In a few moments we're going to embark upon a journey together and this journey requires no prior tech background, no special IT knowledge and definitely no coding experience. In fact, the only prerequisite is that you bring a sense of curiosity which you seem to already have because you 're watching this video. By the end of this course you're going to have a solid foundation in cloud concepts and Amazon Web Services. Enough that you're going to be able to sit for and hopefully smash that AWS certified cloud practitioner exam. Heck you might even be able to launch your own cloud based startup by the end of this thing. Even if you're not aiming for a certification or Bezos level fame and fortune but just want to be hip to the AWS lingo that all the cool kids seem to be using nowadays, you're in the right place. So let's get started.

0:00Okay, let's get this party started. Now, sometimes I may be popping up down here or over here, or maybe I'm just lurking in the shadows like this. So that's what I'm going to do for this video is I'm just going to lurk in the shadows and share with you some information about this course and how to use this course and some of my philosophy about how we go about learning some of this stuff. One of the first things just right out of the gate is I wanted to let you know that I am completely understanding of the fact that many of us are coming from different backgrounds and we're taking this course for different reasons. Perhaps we're just lifelong learners and we love learning and we just want to learn about AWS and maybe we're trying to set ourselves up for a career advancement, maybe a career change. Maybe if you're young, you're just getting into the industry and you're curious about what AWS can do and how you might be able to fit into that. Maybe you're middle aged and you're going through a career change. I can completely identify with that.

1:03After 30 years in corporate IT, I decided to take a pivot seven years ago and teach people how to cloud. Maybe you're curious about AWS or maybe you're skeptical. I'm sure we've all seen those memes of the cloud is nothing more than somebody else's computer. Well, it's a little bit more nuanced than that. But if you're here because you're skeptical and you just want to educate yourself and learn more about it, I definitely welcome you to this course. And then of course, we're going to have some folks here that were volunteered to take this course. Maybe their organization is adopting AWS and they were told, Hey, if you want to be part of this project, you're going to have to educate yourselves on AWS. So go take this course. I completely can empathize with that and understand that hopefully as we get into this course, you're not going to feel like this is a chore. And in fact, for this course and all my other courses, I really try to make them fun, enjoyable, and engaging to go through. So hopefully this is not like taking some nasty medicine or something like that. But nonetheless, I welcome each and every one of you into this course. Now I also want to touch on something else and it's called the Dunning Kruger effect. And it uses a curve like this. There were two psychologists a while back named David Dunning and Justin Kruger. And they did some experiments

2:19on how people estimate their own abilities and their own confidence. And this type of curve you may have seen before it's used in a lot of different things. Gardner has something they call the hype cycle, which kind of uses this curve as well. And it's not too far from that, as a matter of fact. What this is saying is that early in our experience, we're going to build our confidence and it's going to become pretty high because we don't really know what we don't know. And then at some point, we're going to realize, wow, there's way more that we don't know. And then our confidence is going to plummet, basically. And we're going to find ourselves in this trough of disillusionment. And we may experience imposter syndrome. Hey, we shouldn't be here. We're not worthy of learning this stuff.

3:05And along with that goes some self doubt. And the reason I wanted to point this out is that in this course, you're going to be learning new stuff. And sometimes learning new stuff is really hard. And so you might find yourself in this trough of disillusionment, this imposter syndrome. Hey, I'm just not cut out for this AWS stuff, maybe this self doubt. But I wanted to let you know that we've all been there. Everybody who has learned something new, most everybody who has learned something new has at some point or another faced these same things. So I just wanted to let you know that you're not alone. If you get to a point in this course where you feel like, hey, this is too difficult, just keep on charge and keep on pushing. And it's going to work out in the end, I promise you, there are thousands and thousands of other people that have already walked this path.

3:52And you can walk this path to. And there's a reason that we call it a learning curve. It doesn't happen all at once. Here's an example. If I were to say something like this, our AWS landscape consists of a static website hosted on S three front ended with CloudFront as our CDN. Our ecom site is hosted in uss two and runs on a multi AZ EC2 spot fleet behind an ALB back ended by Aurora RDS. You may be saying what in the world is he even talking about? But with just a little bit of cloud knowledge, a little bit of knowledge of AWS and some of the terminology and some of the services, you're going to be able to fully understand what I just said. And by the end of this course, you're going to know what all this stuff means. So I fully want to identify and recognize and empathize with the fact that somewhere in this course, you may say, Hey, this is way over my head, stick to it. I promise you, if you just stick to it, if you do the exercises, you answer the quiz questions and you do all the stuff, then you're going to get this, you're going to know this stuff.

0:00All right, let's talk about some of the different learning methods that we're going to use for this course. And when I talk about learning methods, I like to use something called Bloom's Taxonomy. And this is a hierarchy. This represents the different levels of learning that we can do. Now down here at the base, remember, and this is just memorization more or less . And I can remember when I was in school having to memorize my multiplication tables. I hated it, but supposedly that was serving as the basis for some higher level knowledge. Now, above remembering is we have understanding.

0:33Here's why things happen the way they do. We're not just remembering things and recalling facts. We're understanding how they work. Now, on top of that, we're able to apply that information. So once we understand stuff, we can apply it to other activities or other scenarios. Now, on top of apply, we have analyze, evaluate and create. Now, I'm not going to dive into these right here. Because for this course, we're mostly going to be focused on this, but I definitely don't want to spend a whole lot of time with memorization because that's not very useful to you.

1:10I want to really focus on this understanding and this applying as we go through this course content. And that's also what AWS has in mind when they laid out their certifications. So we are here down here at this cloud practitioner. And that's what they consider a foundational knowledge set. Now, on top of that, we have the sysops administrator, the developer solutions architect, associate and the data engineer associates. And these are kind of mid-level certifications and they kind of go to those applying and maybe a little bit of these analyzing as well.

1:48Now, once you get up to some of these higher level certifications, the advanced networking, machine learning, the security specialty, these are deep dives into these particular topics. Then we also have these two biggies right here and these are considered some of the most challenging certifications in the IT industry because they're so wide in their breadth and depth of the stuff that you need to know to pass these cert ifications. So this would be more analogous to up here at the top level, the evaluate and create.

2:23So for our purposes right now, it's going to serve us very well to get a baseline understanding and a foundational understanding of what AWS is. And then you can use that to if you want to pursue some of these other cert ifications. So here's my little disclaimer on certifications. Certifications mean proof of knowledge, right? No, they do not. They do not mean proof of knowledge. I look at them more as a framework for learning. Sure, we know many people who are absolutely brilliant, but maybe in an exam environment, they just crumble or maybe you're like that too.

2:58Yes, the certification is something to be proud of, but it's not the be all end all. I've met some people who have loads of credentials, but in a practical setting, they couldn't architect their way out of a wet paper bag. So just so we're on the same page, I didn't want you to obsess about getting the certification. I want you to think about the knowledge journey rather than the end goal of just passing that exam, because if you look at this as a journey and a knowledge building process, the exam stuff's going to take care of itself.

3:30So here are some learning methods that we're going to be using in this course. Now, obviously there's an audio visual component. You're sitting here watching a video and you're listening to me, Yay, Moron also includes some text in the skills, sometimes for clarification, sometimes for reinforcement, and sometimes just as a complete non sequitur to keep things interesting. Now, occasionally I might direct you to a specific AWS resource, such as a YouTube video or a blog article that I found particularly helpful.

4:00We also have quiz questions throughout the skill. Some of the questions are designed to be similar to exam type questions to get you in the practice of doing those things and get you comfortable with those. Others are more just to check in and see how you're feeling as we progress through this course. Now, although this is considered a beginner course, I do believe that one of the best ways to learn is just to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. In some skills, I'm going to step through an activity on Amazon Web Services and you can follow along if you wish.

4:33Additionally, in some skills, I have some challenges for you. And these are real world scenarios where you can decide the level of difficulty . Kind of like a choose your own adventure type thing. And I'll explain more about those when we get there. But wait, there's more because this is your learning journey. You can customize this journey. One of the things that I've heard from a lot of students is that if they come together as a group to take this course, they get some more out of this material.

5:04They can kind of communicate with one another and discuss some of the lessons and maybe help each other out on the challenges or the hands on. Plus, when you get a group together, there's a little bit of accountability and you can help motivate each other in your learning journey. I've also heard of people creating flashcards for AWS services. And some of these acronyms can really seem like just an absolute alphabet soup when we're just getting started. So people will write the acronyms on one side and then the either the function or the purpose or the full name on the other side and they can help quiz themselves on this. Again, that's more of that foundational summarization that I really didn't want to focus in on in this course.

5:46But feel free to use that as a method to learn some of this stuff. I also wouldn't underestimate AWS blogs or dare I say it, reading the documentation. And yes, I'm saying that as someone who generally throws the instructions into the recycling bin, AWS documentation isn't that bad. And also talk to folks, talk to folks who are already working in AWS, ask them how they got started and what they found was their best way to learn. Most people are really eager to share their story. And this is where we can get the real story.

6:18We can see how people kind of had their own struggle to get to where they were getting and trust me, everybody struggles sooner or later when you're trying to learn new stuff and I know it may not seem like it if you go out to LinkedIn. You see the highlight reel of everybody's promotions and stuff like that. But there's a lot of hard work behind the scenes and you're only going to get a real story if you just start talking to people. So by the end of this course, I would hope that you're going to have a very good understanding of some common cloud computing strategies and concepts.

6:50Now, I also want you to be hip to the AWS lingo. So if somebody's talking AWS speak, that you're going to be able to understand what they're talking about. And then also I want you to be familiar with some of the AWS best practices and the potential danger zone. Yes, there are danger zones and because I am not an employee of AWS, I can share the good and the bad with youth that I've seen over the years. So we have certain responsibilities that are ours and if we do not fulfill those responsibilities properly, then bad things can happen.

7:22And I also want you to have a very good chance at passing that AWS certified cloud practitioner exam. But again, as I said earlier, don't obsess over this. This is a learning journey. You learn the material, the exam will take care of itself. Now, finally, after you've gone through your cloud journey, I want you to help somebody else start their cloud journey. As I said earlier, it's very important. It's very useful, I think, to talk to other folks who have gone before you and learn about what worked for them, what didn't work for them, what was confusing, what was easy.

7:57And I think we all have that responsibility to help somebody else as they're just because invariably somebody is going to help you as you're just starting.

0:00It may be hard to believe that only about 25 years ago Amazon was just a scrap EE commerce startup. And this is a picture of their webpage from 2002 courtesy of the Internet Archive. And you can see here the Nintendo GameCube system is now available for $99. Looks like Halo was just released here. And if you remember if you're old school on Amazon you remember this gold box, the little treasure box that you can get some deals in. Now from the outside looking in, somebody would probably just assume this is a perfect success story.

0:32They started in 1994, enjoyed growth. But like many other startups, they eventually became victim to their own growth . And in 2000 they realized that their growth was being hampered by something called technical debt. And that brings us to our first techie term, technical debt. It's the future cost incurred by making an easier choice in the near term. In other words, if you're familiar with the Popeye universe, if that is a thing , there's a character in Popeye called wimpy and it's catch phrases.

1:06I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Another analogy here is plopping down that credit card to buy that new GameCube for example, and just saying yeah, I'll pay it off later. So that is technical debt and that's a real thing. Now, technical debt can mean monetary debt or it could just mean functional debt, meaning that to progress at some point in the future to progress, you're going to have to satisfy that debt or maybe re-engineer something to get around that.

1:38It's easy in retrospect to say yeah, we should have anticipated that technical debt but in a lot of cases, you just don't know that you're incurring technical debt in the moment. For example, another analogy here is the three little pigs. The two of the three little pigs probably incurred some technical debt when they decided to build their houses out of straw and sticks because maybe it was cheap and it was readily available, but they really had no way of predicting that the Big Bad Wolf was going to come by and blow their house down. Now if they had known that, they probably would have built it out of bricks like the other pig did, but nonetheless, Amazon had found themselves under the weight of this technical debt.

2:17And what they decided is that it was a prime time, it was a perfect opportunity for them to start re-architecting things. And they created these modular services, these services that can be reused by their developers rather than having the developer having to create something from scratch every time they needed a new function. They created these modular services that were shared across their organization. Now somebody inside Amazon said, hey, maybe there's a business opportunity here . And in 2004, they released something called the Simple Q service.

2:52And this is considered the first AWS service that was publicly available. And two years later, they relaunched Simple Q service. And they also added Simple Storage service and Elastic Cloud Compute. Now we'll get into what these services are later, but these were considered the first services. And back in 2006, nobody else was doing this. These were services that you could just pay for. You could just rent computing capacity. And when you didn't need it anymore, you could just stop paying for it.

3:23And that was something that was completely novel. Now because AWS had that first mover advantage, they enjoyed the market lead for a very long time, even up to today. Now other competitors like Microsoft's Azure and Google Cloud have been upping their game for sure. Any Azure is considered probably the prime competitor to AWS right now, nipping at AWS's heels. But nonetheless, AWS claims that at least 90% of the Fortune 100 companies use their services and products.

3:55Now mind you, that doesn't mean they use their services and products exclusively. It is not uncommon at all for large corporations to use multiple clouds. But that is a topic for another time. What's important here is just understand the origin story of how AWS came to be . It really is a story of Amazon trying to solve their own internal problems. Low and behold, other companies had those same problems as well. And thus the cloud computing market was born.

0:00Now in certain parts of this course, I am going to go out to AWS, the AWS console and do stuff and walk through stuff. And I would love for you to walk through that with me as well. And to do that, you're going to need an AWS account. Now, if you already have one, that's cool. You can use that. If you don't, I'm going to walk you through the process of setting up an account. Now, the cool thing about AWS is that for new accounts, they have something called a free tier. So there's a lot of stuff that you can do that's not going to cost anything. But I will caution you, we are just setting up the account.

0:32It is not going to be ready for prime time just yet. You're going to have to stick around to subsequent skills where we're going to put some security measures in place and some budgetary measures in place to make sure that we don't spend more than we want. Or maybe we don't go past what is already available free for our account. 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.

1:03These advertisements and promotions they have going here tend to change. So if your screen looks different, then don't worry about it too much. What we're most interested here is this button up here that says create an AWS account. I'm going to click on that. And it's going to take me to a signup page or at least the first part of the signup 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.

1:35We'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. It has the ability to do basically everything inside that account. Now, spoiler alert for a future skill. 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.

2:09But 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. So I'm going to enter this email address here. Scott Pletcher plus cloud practice at CBT nuggets.com. That is going to go to my email address or an email address box that I have access to.

2:42Next, 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 Pletcher 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 and it's asking me to put in a verification code.

3:13So 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.

3:44So I'm going to enter a password here that tries to satisfy these conditions here. So I have some upper case letters, some lower case letters, numbers and some non-alpha numeric 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?

4:16This 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. Those 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.

5:00It 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 one dollar 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.

5:34OK, 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. OK, so I've just entered my phone number information and the little capture code. I'm going to check my phone here.

6:06And 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.

6:37Now, 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 because 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. It has some other benefits too.

7:09But for now, we're just going to use basic support. And I'm going to complete the site 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. It'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 IAM 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.

7:43And 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. Now I'm going to stop the video right here because in another video, I wanted to walk you through this console, all the parts and pieces and what are the important things that you may need to pay attention to.

0:00All right, we have three main ways to get stuff done in AWS or on AWS, depending on how you want to phrase it. The first option we have is something called a command line interface. And sometimes people call this CLI, just kind of abbreviated as CLI. And what a command line interface is, it's a piece of software that we can download from AWS, they provide it to us. And we can install it on our computer. And then once we've installed it on our computer, we can use that to send instructions to AWS from our computer.

0:36Maybe not our computer, it can be a server somewhere or some other computer. And generally this is done at what we call a command line. This is a pretty low level old school way of issuing commands to anything. We can use command lines for many different purposes. But in this case, this is an example of executing the AWS CLI, which here is called AWS. And then these things right here are instructions that we are sending to AWS to do stuff.

1:11In this particular case, this command is trying to copy a cat picture to an S3 bucket on AWS. Now, you don't have to worry about what S3 is or what any of this stuff is. But just know that this is how a command line interface looks and this is how we can use it. Now, generally speaking, it's pretty utilitarian. It's no frills. We can download this for Windows or Linux or Mac or whatever operating system we happen to be using.

1:42And generally speaking, you're going to go out to something called a terminal session. And that's what this thing is right here. It's called a terminal session. It kind of harkens back to the days when we had mainframes and you would have a terminal that you would sit down with a keyboard and that giant monitor. And then you would just pick away and give it instructions. Well, today we call that a terminal session because of that that origin of having a computer terminal that we would send instructions.

2:12So this is still part of most operating systems nowadays. You can open up a terminal session and generally you don't use this unless you 're doing some automation or scripting or if you want to do some pretty advanced capabilities. And that's where the command line interface for AWS comes into play. Very often it's used for putting into scripts, meaning we can put a series of instructions into a piece of code. And that's going to execute those instructions in that order thereby saving us from having to execute each individual instruction all the time.

2:49So if we wanted to have a backup that ran maybe daily of all our documents, we could create a script that would execute the CLI command and copy all our documents out to AWS, for example. Now the command line interface is generally pretty popular for folks that have like DevOps roles or sysops roles. Those are the folks that are really responsible for making things run kind of behind the scenes under the covers, so to speak. And generally speaking, if you're just starting out with AWS, you're probably not going to use the command line interface.

3:22The next option we have for doing stuff on AWS is something called the software developer kit. It's also abbreviated as SDK sometimes. So you may hear it in those terms and software developer kits are kind of what they sound like. Again, their software provided by AWS and it allows us to do stuff with whatever our favorite programming language is. And generally these software development kits are used by software developers to write software to do stuff with and to AWS resources.

3:56And there's a lot of supported programming languages. There's JavaScript. There's Java. There's Python. There's Rust. There's go. And the list goes on and on and on. There's probably maybe about 13, 14, maybe even 15 different languages that are supported by AWS. And you can go out and freely download these software development kits and then you can install them on your computer. And if you're a software developer, you'll have something like an integrated development environment and IDE.

4:28And you can use the software development kits to code stuff. And because we can write our own code, our own instructions for doing stuff, yet we can also leverage some of the libraries that are provided in these software development kits. It makes our development go much faster than if we were trying to do everything from scratch. So therefore, the software development kits and this method is pretty flexible and it's very versatile. Because we can insert our own logic and our own processes to do things.

5:02And an example of who might use this is maybe somebody is creating a mobile app that is supposed to upload a picture you shoot from your phone, for example. They would create that software. They would use AWS as software development kit for whatever language they're programming in. Then you can install that application on your phone. And then behind the scenes that software development kit is going to kick in and whenever it needs to interact with AWS, it's going to know how to interact with AWS.

5:33And it's going to handle all that connectivity and all those instructions all by itself. So the developer or you as the user don't have to worry about any of that stuff . And the final way we have to get stuff done on AWS is something called the AWS console. And that's exactly what we're going to dive into now.

0:00Okay, so in our last video, we kind of left off at this point, we had just created our brand new AWS account, we had logged into it using our root user. Remember, that's the most powerful user in our entire account, it can do anything, which is a blessing and a curse sometimes. But now we are logged into our console, this is known as the AWS console. And if it's your first time here, you're going to get these little pop ups here, it's going to want to take you through basically a tour of the console, you can feel free to go through that, I'm just going to skip through this, because I'm going to show you all the stuff that it's pointing out and more anyway. So here are our parts and pieces. So over here to the far left, we have AWS, you can just click on this, and it's going to take you to the AWS console, this is basically the home base for us.

0:52So if you get into the AWS console and you kind of get disoriented or lost or something like that, you can always come over here and click this little picture right here. Let me make this a little bit bigger here. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't because it tries to flow these little widgets in place, and sometimes they don't look very good when it's scaled very large. So let's try it this way. So if I get lost, I can always click here, and it's going to take me back to this home. Now for each one of these little bits here, there's this little info hyperlink here, and I can click on that, and it's going to give me some information over here of how to use this. So again, if you want to figure out how best to use some of these things here, you can always click on that info. And it's going to give you a definition of what may be in there, and what purpose that serves.

1:47Now all these things right here, all these little boxes are referred to as widgets, and we can customize this depending on what we want to see. And we're going to do that in a little bit here. But continuing right along the toolbar here, we have services. Now if you remember in one of our last videos, we said that way back in 2004 and 2006, AWS released simple queue service, elastic compute cloud, and simple storage service as some of the first services. Well, now there are a ton of services. I don't know how many services are hundreds at least of services, and you can access those services here by clicking on this little icon here. And it gives us a menu, we can scroll down. And again, if this is the first time you're seeing this, this is probably pretty overwhelming, and I can completely understand that. So if I want to see what are the services that are for storage.

2:46So I can click on storage here, and it's going to give me links to all the services that have anything to do with storage. We have AWS backup, EFS, elastic disaster recovery , FSX, and we'll get into all these services later in due time. But here's how you can access the services of AWS. And you can click down through here, it might be good to just get some, get some familiarity with some of these services. Again, you don't have to know what they all are at this point in time.

3:18We're going to get into that and subsequent skills. And we're going to step through some of these services and explain what they do and what their pros and cons are. But for now , I just wanted you to get familiar with how to access that now, if you happen to know the name of the service, you can search for it. So for example, here, if I search for simple, there's a simple queue service right there. So it helps me just quickly identify a service that I'm looking for. Now, this little star here allows me to bookmark that service. So if you saw I clicked on that star, if I go back here, you can see it now appears on my little header bar here. So if we want to access certain services very frequently, it may make sense to bookmark them like that. I'm going to uncheck that there. Now, one of the other things to note here in this search is it's pretty versatile.

4:15Not only does it show us the services, but it also widens the search to give us some resources and some documentation. So if we were looking for a particular article of how to do something, we could basically type in how to create an IAM account. And it's going to search for that. And it's going to give us what it returns. So how do I create an IAM policy, so forth, so on. So again, I would suggest maybe spending a little bit of time out here, just getting familiar with what types of stuff you can type in here, and what you're going to have down here. We can access blogs, marketplace. Now the marketplace AWS marketplace is a location where third parties can publish their AWS creations. And we can purchase those. Sometimes we can purchase it for free. Sometimes it's offered for free. Sometimes there's a free trial. Sometimes there's a subscription, but we can offer we can purchase those things as a customer. And it comes through on our AWS bill.

5:22So we don't have to contract with any sort of third party there. It's all happening through our AWS billing. We'll go into marketplace a little bit later, but I just wanted to point it out here in case you were wondering what in the world is marketplace, we have tutorials, and then any events if there's any sort of events like an on demand event or a live stream that's going to cover, you know, whatever we asked up here, then this is where those would appear continuing right along. This is a pretty nifty feature here that is relatively new. It is our cloud shell.

5:59And this is creating a little tiny, well, let's see here, let me see if I can expand it. There we go. So what this is doing is it's creating a little tiny instance, a little tiny version of a computer, a virtual computer, and giving us a command line interface that we can execute commands on. So I can do AWS S3 LS. Now that command is the AWS CLI, if you remember from a few slides ago, S3 is the service. LS is the command that I sent to that service. And what this is saying is, hey, AWS, that's the CLI S3, which is the service, simple storage service. And then I'm doing LS, which is the command for list. So basically what I told it to do there is list on my S3 buckets.

6:52Well, I don't have any S3 buckets in this account just yet. So it didn't really come back with anything. But anyway, this is how I can pretty quickly and easily access a command line interface. If I wanted to do something, if I knew how to do it via command line interface, and I didn't want to fumble around navigating through the console, then this is the way I could do that. Scale us back down here, because it's a little bit difficult to see everything. And so all I do is I just click on that, it pops up. And it's a little bit persistent, meaning it's going to stay out there for a period of time. I can always just go over here to new actions and say restart my cloud show, I can delete my cloud show, I can upload a file to it. So in essence, think about it as just a little tiny computer that's kind of hanging out there, allowing us to do some pretty low level stuff if we prefer to do stuff via the command line interface. So I'm going to X out of that.

7:47Now we go to the bell icon here, and these are our notifications. Now we can customize these notifications, but there are also some default notifications here. So we can click on see all health events. And this is going to take us to a screen that is going to give us any sort of problems that AWS is currently experiencing that may or may not affect our resources. So we can see here under event logs, they had some operational issues in Northern Virginia, operational issues globally here. And these issues are closed. Generally speaking, AWS is pretty open about their problems and issues. If it's a large issue, they will do an after incident report where they do a deep dive into the root cause of those things and explain to customers who were impacted why it happened and what they're doing to prevent it from happening again. So again, I'm not going to spend too much time here. This is a little bit overwhelming, I understand. And if you remember, how do I get back to my main console? I'm going to click on that little AWS icon there. Okay, so that's notifications. Oops.

8:58And yes, of course, they're always interested in the user experience. So occasionally you're going to get these little popups here that says, how would you rate your service console experience? Oh, say, yeah, it's great. Sure. And so that's the notifications. Now, in addition to the health notification, we can also configure other notifications that can be sent to either email or mobile device . Or there are integrations into chat applications like Slack, for example, if your company happens to use Slack, there is a way that you can integrate a Slack channel into AWS. And it works by using the software development kit. And it can interface with AWS, you can actually send commands to do stuff on AWS via a Slack channel, which is kind of nifty. Now here is support. Now to get support, you can click on support center here. And this is kind of reminiscent of a typical ticketing type support center. I'm going to X out of this to give us some more space here. So here's my support plan, my support plan, let me enlarge that as my support plan is basic. I can also view different support plans here if I wanted to compare in contrast and decide maybe, hey, I

10:15want to upgrade. This gives me a breakdown, a little bit more detailed breakdown than we saw when we signed up for our account. Let's go down here. So you can see we have the basic which we 're on right now. Now the pay versions are developer, business, enterprise on ramp and enterprise . And they have different service level agreements, meaning that AWS will try to address your problem within a certain amount of time. And there are other benefits and reasons why you might want to opt for one of these other support agreements. As I said, I really recommend at a minimum, if you're a business, at a minimum, use the business support plan, because that's going to give you a decent response level, especially if your business is reliant on AWS resources to earn money or do transact business transactions. So here we are back at the support center, we can create a case.

11:15And again, this is very reminiscent to any sort of help desk, you can create a case here. And I can specify whether it's a counter billing or technical. And this is what it says right here, technical support is unavailable under the basic support plan. Basically, they're saying, Hey, tough luck, you need to go search the documentation and figure it out yourself. So that's the, that's one of the cons of the basic support level. Now I can choose a count on billing, and it's going to ask me which service I can give it some more detail here. And I can provide details of the problem I 'm trying to resolve. Now, in my experience on the basic support plan, generally the support staff will pick up the ticket within about 24 hours. And that doesn't mean it's going to be resolved in 24 hours. It just means that it'll be acknowledged that they received it in 24 hours. So you can come back out here and you can see any sort of cases that you've opened. And there are some other hyperlinks here, obviously, they're going to want to try to gear you towards self service resolution so that you can figure out what your problem is and solve it yourself. But you do have this as an option. So again, I'm going to click on our little AWS icon here, that's going to take me

12:32back out. So that is support. Now we go to this little gear here, and this just provides us with some options here on this console, we can choose a different default language if we want to. And we can choose whether or not we want dark mode light mode or browser default, there are some more settings in here. These are basically just more of the same that we saw in that little drop down here. And we can also decide if we want AWS to remember the services that we recently visited.

13:05And I'll show you where that happens. So right here in this widget right here, we can we can move it around if we wanted to, we can move it over here. But it is displaying the services that we recently visited, which is kind of handy because if you recently visited someplace and you want to go back there pretty quickly, it's going to be listed up under here. Now you saw that I just kind of had the ability to move these little widgets around that's one of the benefits of this console home. In fact, we can add widgets, and we can decide what we want, we can do with op summary patch compliance, managed instances, that sort of thing, we have other options down here. This is a widget that I keep a close eye on in my own personal accounts. Now, because we just created this account, we're not incurring any cost. And that's something important to realize is that just by creating account, we're not going to incur any cost. So it's not going to cost us anything. So there's no data in here. Plus, we also have to turn on something called cost explore that's going to help us analyze what our costs are. But what you'll get here is a month by month bar chart here. You can customize it a little bit and tell it to show you different information. Now, if we have some applications that we have created, we can create an application here, and it's

14:22going to show us what that application is and how it's performing and so forth and so on. But again, we can customize these things. I think by default, they kind of throw a bunch of stuff up here that's a little bit overwhelming. But something that is a little bit useful here is build a solution. So these are basically little tutorials that will take you through it during doing certain things. For example, if you're an SAP shop, if you run SAP as your enterprise resource planning software, they have a little tutorial here that will help you deploy SAP on AWS. Now, granted, this is not going to be a production ready deployment of SAP, but it's just a pretty nifty little exercise that you can step through to learn more about AWS. So if we go up here , again, progressing to the right, we have this thing that says Ohio. Well, this represents this drop down represents all the different regions that AWS has data centers in. And we'll get into how AWS is structured physically in a later skill. But for now, if we wanted to, for instance, teleport ourselves to Northern Virginia, we can click on that little drop down there.

15:34And now we are in Northern Virginia. Now, granted, this console home is the same across all regions, we're going to see the same view. But you can see here, we're now in the US East Northern Virginia region. And that's a different set of data centers than Ohio, which is a different set of data centers than Northern California and Oregon and so forth and so on. And the fact that AWS has so many data centers scattered around the globe is one of the real benefits of cloud computing, because we can establish points of presence in many different geographies that might be closer to our customers that we want to interact with. So I'm going to just leave that as Northern Virginia. And now we come over here to this little dropdown. And if you remember, we gave this account, this name, this alias, and it's basically just an easy to remember name that we gave it. Here's our account number.

16:31And we can go into our account, we can go into our organization, and we'll cover that in a later skill service quotas. Now AWS isn't necessarily an all you can eat buffet with regard to how many services and how many instances of those services that you can use up. They have certain quotas that they have placed on accounts to make sure that somebody just can't use up hundreds of thousands of things. Now, if you need to go beyond that service quota, if you need instead of, let's say for example, let's see if we can go out here to the dashboard, here we go, Amazon, we'll do DynamoDB. And again, we'll talk about what DynamoDB is in a future skill.

17:13But here we go, if we wanted global secondary indexes per table, we're allowed 20. And the default value we're given is 20. And we can request if we wanted to implement a 21st global secondary index per table, we would have to request a quota increase. So we can click on that and we can scroll down here and scroll up here and request an increase at the account level. And so you can see here, not everything is metered, not everything has a quota. But there are a lot of things in AWS that do have quotas. And if you're a large organization, sometimes you're going to run into those quota limits, and you may have to request a quota increase. And again, it's not a very big deal. They're usually more than happy to do that. It just makes sure that customers don't use up all the resources in a particular region, leaving none for everybody else. Then we have billing and cost management. And again, we're going to go into that in a different skill.

18:18Then we have security credentials. And this is what I want to dive into in the very next video, because we're going to do something very important. We're going to put multi factor authentication onto our root account.

0:00So 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. And 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.

0:48So 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 MFA'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.

1:30I'm partial to UB keys, I use UB keys for as many accounts 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, like I said, last, past bitwarden those things. So I am going to say, let's see, bitwarden, 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.

2:41Now 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, 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.

3:22So I'm going to scan this QR code with my bitwarden mobile account here. 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 that 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.

3:55So 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. Then 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 we have to do the best practices, we have to follow those best practices. So now we go back out to AWS console.

4:53And this is where I'm going to wrap up the video. This was just kind of a quick tour of that console. In subsequent skills and subsequent videos, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into AWS and how do we do stuff. And eventually, you're going to become pretty familiar with this console and learn how to navigate it pretty well. So I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.