My Hands-On Experience with AWS Cloud-Native Systems
I recently attended a workshop on Cloud-Native Systems & Applied AI Integration, where I got an introduction to AWS and several important cloud computing concepts.
Introduction to AWS
We started with AWS (Amazon Web Services) and its pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users pay based on the resources they use.
We also discussed the "Pizza as a Service" model to understand different levels of cloud services:
- Traditional On-Premises
- IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service
- CaaS — Container as a Service
- PaaS — Platform as a Service
- FaaS — Function as a Service
- SaaS — Software as a Service
- AIaaS — AI as a Service
This helped me understand how responsibilities are divided between the user and the cloud provider across different service models.
Session 1: EC2, S3 and Networking
The first session covered some of the fundamental AWS services and networking concepts.
IAM
We learned about IAM (Identity and Access Management), which is used to manage users, permissions, and access to AWS resources.
Regions and Availability Zones
AWS infrastructure is organized into Regions, which contain multiple Availability Zones (AZs). This architecture helps provide high availability and fault tolerance.
Amazon S3
We explored Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and its use for storing and hosting static objects such as website files.
Some important concepts we covered were:
Bucket: A container used to store objects. S3 bucket names must be globally unique.
High Availability: S3 is designed to provide highly durable and available storage.
ACL: Access Control Lists can be used to control access to S3 resources.
Bucket Policy: A policy used to define access permissions for objects within an S3 bucket.
We also learned about Amazon CloudFront, which is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that can distribute content from an origin such as S3.
Hands-On: Deploying My Portfolio
For the practical session, I used my portfolio website, which was contained entirely in a single index.html file.
I created an S3 bucket, uploaded my index.html, configured the bucket for static website hosting, and accessed my portfolio through the S3 website endpoint.
We then attempted to configure CloudFront with the S3 bucket as the origin. However, AWS required my account to be verified before I could create a new CloudFront resource, so I could not complete that part during the workshop.
We also explored AWS Cloud Quest, which provided an interactive way to learn and practice AWS concepts.
Key Takeaways
This workshop gave me practical exposure to cloud deployment and helped me understand how services such as IAM, EC2, S3, networking, and CloudFront fit together in a cloud environment.
The hands-on deployment of my own portfolio using S3 was particularly useful because it allowed me to see the process of taking a local index.html file and making it accessible through AWS.
Although I could not complete the CloudFront deployment because of the account verification issue, troubleshooting the error was also a valuable part of the learning experience.
Technologies: AWS S3, AWS CloudFront, EC2, IAM, HTML, Static Website Hosting
Workshop: Cloud-Native Systems & Applied AI Integration
Coimbatore Institute of Technology | September 15–16, 2026
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