AWS WORKSHOP

My First AWS Learning Session: Exploring AWS Infrastructure, S3, CloudFront

Introduction

As part of my learning journey in cloud computing, I attended my first session on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The session introduced us to the fundamentals of AWS infrastructure and some important AWS services.

We learned the basic concepts of Regions, Availability Zones, Regional and Global services, High Availability, ACLs, Tags, Amazon S3, Bucket Policies, and Amazon CloudFront.

The session also included a practical activity where we hosted our portfolio webpage using Amazon S3 and CloudFront. This hands-on experience helped us understand how cloud services can be used to store and deliver web content.

AWS Infrastructure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides a wide range of services for computing, storage, networking, databases, security, artificial intelligence, and more.

AWS provides a global infrastructure that allows applications and data to be deployed and accessed from different geographical locations.

In the session, we were introduced to the basic concepts of Regions and Availability Zones.

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AWS Regions

An AWS Region is a geographical area where AWS provides its cloud services.

AWS has multiple Regions around the world. When using many AWS services, we select a Region based on our requirements.

The choice of Region can depend on factors such as:

• Location of users
• Performance
• Cost
• Service availability
• Data requirements

Understanding Regions is important because some AWS resources are created within a specific Region.

Availability Zones

An Availability Zone (AZ) is an isolated location within an AWS Region.

A Region can contain multiple Availability Zones. These Availability Zones are designed to be independent from each other while being connected through AWS networking infrastructure.

Using multiple Availability Zones can help applications achieve better reliability and High Availability.

Regional and Global Services

We also learned the difference between Regional Services and Global Services.

Regional Services

Regional services are associated with a particular AWS Region.

Examples include:

• Amazon EC2
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon VPC

When creating these resources, we generally select the Region in which the resource should operate.

Global Services

Global services are designed to operate at a global level rather than being restricted to a single Region.

Examples include:

• AWS IAM
• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon Route 53

Understanding whether a service is regional or global is useful when planning an AWS architecture.

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High Availability (HA)

HA stands for High Availability.

High Availability refers to designing systems so that they remain available and reliable even when failures occur.

AWS provides different infrastructure components and services that can be used to build highly available applications.

For example, distributing resources across multiple Availability Zones can reduce the impact of a failure in a single Availability Zone.

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 stands for Simple Storage Service.

S3 is an object storage service provided by AWS. It can be used to store and retrieve different types of data.

Some common uses of S3 include storing:

• Web files
• Images
• Videos
• Documents
• Backups
• Application data

S3 stores objects inside buckets.

The basic structure can be represented as:

S3 → Bucket → Object

In our practical activity, we created an S3 bucket and used it to store our portfolio webpage.

ACL – Access Control List

ACL stands for Access Control List.

ACLs are used to define access permissions for resources.

In Amazon S3, ACLs can be used to control access to buckets and objects.

Through this concept, we learned how access permissions can be managed in cloud storage.

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Bucket Policy

An S3 Bucket Policy is a resource-based policy used to control access to an S3 bucket and the objects inside it.

A bucket policy can specify:

• Who can access the bucket
• What actions they can perform
• Which resources they can access
• Under what conditions access is allowed

Understanding bucket policies is important when working with S3 and other AWS services such as CloudFront.

Tags

Tags are key-value pairs that can be attached to AWS resources.

They are useful for identifying and organizing resources and understanding their purpose.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service provided by AWS.

CloudFront helps deliver content to users efficiently through a distributed network of locations.

Instead of always accessing the origin directly, CloudFront can serve content through its edge locations, which can improve the performance of content delivery.

CloudFront can be used for delivering:

• Web pages
• Images
• Videos
• Files
• Other web content

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Hosting Our Portfolio Using S3 and CloudFront

The most important practical activity in our first session was hosting our portfolio webpage using Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront.

1. Creating the S3 Bucket

First, we created an S3 bucket to store our portfolio webpage.

2. Uploading the Portfolio

We uploaded only our index.html file into the S3 bucket.

The index.html file contained our portfolio webpage.

The basic structure was:

S3 Bucket
│
└── index.html

3. Configuring Access

We learned about S3 access control and Bucket Policies and configured the required settings for accessing the webpage.

4. Creating CloudFront

After uploading the index.html file to S3, we created a CloudFront distribution.

The S3 bucket was used as the origin for CloudFront.

The overall flow can be represented as:

User
  ↓
CloudFront
  ↓
S3 Bucket
  ↓
index.html

CloudFront acts as the content delivery layer, while S3 stores the webpage.

5. Accessing the Portfolio

After configuring CloudFront, the portfolio webpage could be accessed through the CloudFront distribution.

This practical implementation helped us understand how S3 and CloudFront work together to store and deliver web content.

# AWS Cloud Quest

AWS Cloud Quest was introduced as part of our AWS learning journey.

It provides a practical and interactive way to learn AWS concepts and services.

In this stage, we were introduced to Cloud Quest as a learning resource. We have not yet completed the Cloud Quest, so it remains part of our ongoing AWS learning journey.

*# What I Learned From the Session
*
The first AWS session helped me build a basic understanding of cloud computing and AWS services.

The key concepts I learned were:

• AWS Infrastructure
• AWS Regions
• Availability Zones
• Regional Services
• Global Services
• High Availability
• Amazon S3
• Access Control Lists
• Bucket Policies
• Tags
• Amazon CloudFront
• Hosting a webpage using S3
• Using CloudFront with S3

Most importantly, the practical activity of uploading my index.html portfolio webpage to S3 and connecting it with CloudFront helped me understand how cloud services can be applied to a real-world website.