Getting started with AWS - on the way to cloud

Welcome to byte-sized learning resources and tutorials in Amazon Web Services(AWS) in analytics and machine learning.

Learning AWS services is like walking right into a candy store 👀you are presented with over 200 choices including analytics, storage, compute, management, databases, machine learning, mobile, developer tools and IoT.

Free services - you may sample some chocolates so to speak which are included in the Free Tier available for 12 months after you sign up for an AWS account. Some services have free trials. What is your use case today? Each service has a different flavour. Let's find out.

Pre-requisites

1: Do you have some Catitude? 🐈

If you understand cats, you will know that they learn by continually playing with their toys.

2: You want to win that 'prize'🎁

Cats are hunters and won't give up until they win their 'prize'. You have a goal to learn more about AWS and are committed to experimenting and deploying services.

The Challenge

To acquire new skills in AWS services that you can quickly implement for work or a project.

Why you should upskill in AWS Services?

Organizations from small businesses, startups, enterprise and government are modernizing in terms of data storage, business intelligence and an appetite for real-time or close to real-time analytics. Business users want to make decisions quickly to serve their customers and improve the customer experience.

AWS services enable business leaders, data scientists and data engineers to work collaboratively to build proof of concepts for specific use cases in analytics and data lake technology to deploy solutions for example in a few days instead of months.

With the global pandemic, most workers (57%) are very or extremely interested in participating in training to upgrade their skills or to learn new skills that could help them advance their career as reported in a recent survey conducted by Amazon and Gallup in June 2021 which surveyed 15,066 respondents.

How to upskill in AWS Services?

There are many paths to advance your career such as:

1. Complete Amazon Training and Certification link here
2. Experiment with Amazon Hands-On Tutorials link here
3. Amazon Documentation link here
4. Attend Amazon AWSome Day link here
5. Attend Amazon Summit link here
6. Attend Tech talks link here
7. Sign up for an Amazon account using AWS Free Tier to experiment with services on the Management Console including services that are free and will expire up to 12 months from the date of signing up for your Amazon account. link here

Create an AWS Account

To get started with AWS services you can access the Management Console by first creating an AWS account. Here is a link

Step 1: Enter your email address under the radio dial for root user and enter your password. Then confirm your password and finally create an AWS username.

Step 2: Enter your credit card details and you will not be charged any fees unless you exceed AWS Free Tier limits. $1 USD/EUR is temporarily held for 3-5 business days to verify your identity.

Step 4: Confirm your identity my entering the PIN sent to your mobile phone

Step 5: Select your support plan.

Step 6: You will receive a confirmation message on your screen that says: 'Congratulations! Thank you for signing up with AWS.

Step 7: On the same screen, you will be provided with the optional step to include details of your current role and what area you are interested in e.g. role: Software Developer and interest:Big Data/Analytics.

Step 8: Check your email for a welcome email from AWS

Congratulations you have created an AWS account

You may read more about experimenting on the Free Tier and the list of services available here

You may take the time to explore various services from the management console. You have completed the pre-requisite to enable you to access other services such as:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

• Amazon Redshift

• Amazon Quicksight

Next Tutorial - Building a Cloud Data Warehouse with Amazon Redshift

In the next tutorial you will learn about Amazon Redshift and data lake architecture.

1. You will create a S3 bucket
2. You will create a Redshift cluster with sample data
3. You will create an IAM role and bring in your own data

Happy Learning!