How to Get Started with AWS: Top 5 Services for Beginners

AWS has taken the tech community by storm. It is easily sold as one of the most reliable providers with an exhaustive list of services from object storage to machine learning. But it can easily be overwhelming for someone new to the cloud. Where should you start when trying to learn AWS? This complete tutorial walks you through the top 5 essential services that every developer should learn first when getting started with Amazon Web Services.

Why Learn AWS?

Amazon Web Services powers millions of businesses worldwide, from startups to enterprise corporations. AWS offers over 200 services covering computing, storage, databases, machine learning, and more. Understanding AWS fundamentals opens doors to cloud computing careers, enables you to build scalable applications, and helps you collaborate more effectively with backend and DevOps teams.

1. Object Storage with AWS S3

S3 is AWS's solution for object storage. From a really simple point of view, S3 buckets are kind of like a hard drive in the cloud for static files. This means while you can upload pretty much anything to S3, once it is there, you cannot really do anything with it except download it or write over it.

But S3 is cheap and storage is a service that pretty much every website needs. This makes S3 a really valuable service that is a de facto part of any modern architecture.

Have some simple images you want to store? Dump them in an S3 bucket. Have some PDFs that you generate for reports? Store and access them from an S3 bucket. While you cannot execute code from S3, browsers work by downloading files like JavaScript and then executing those files on their own, so it is a perfect combo for static web assets or photos.

2. Host a Static Website with AWS S3 and CloudFront

Let us take what we just learned about AWS S3 a little bit further. Since browsers ultimately download files to use them, we can use S3 as a way to host static websites with a simple check of a box.

S3 offers a configuration option that allows us to serve a website from a simple bucket. It sets up the bucket to allow HTTP requests that the browser can recognize, which makes that Gatsby app you just compiled or even a single HTML file a perfect candidate for S3.

CloudFront comes in at the tail end and provides the CDN (content delivery network) for our website. Where S3 allows us to host the website in a bucket, CloudFront sits in front of the bucket as a cached distributed network layer that allows our website to get to our visitors' browsers quicker than straight from S3.

3. Create a Serverless Function with AWS Lambda

If you are new to the serverless world, the idea is not that there are literally no servers. It is just that as a customer, you do not have to manage those servers.

Most cloud providers have some kind of solution for serverless services, but one of the most popular is using Lambda functions from AWS. Lambda functions are what they sound like, a function, but they run in the cloud. You do not have to worry about any of the resources that make that function run, just the environment you want to write in such as Node.js or Python.

What can you do with Lambda?

4. Spin Up a Managed Server with AWS EC2

One of the big selling points of AWS is that we can do all of our computing in our cloud. And that goes for anything. At the core of AWS is Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which is at its simplest a server in the cloud.

Using EC2, you can spin up a server with a variety of available configurations where you can pretty much do whatever you want. You can start small if you only want to do simple operations or you can scale both vertically and horizontally to give you a lot of processing power for your data-heavy operations.

What can you do with EC2?

5. Learn the AWS Acronyms

Seriously. As a front end engineer who has been building websites for a long time, one of the most valuable things to be productive with the rest of the team was to learn the acronyms of the various AWS services.

S3? EC2? CF? You can come up with a lot of wrong answers, but being able to simply know what those things mean makes you capable of keeping up with the conversation. Even though you might primarily work on the front end, you should have an understanding of the concepts of where you store and host your static applications.

Learning the acronyms does not necessarily mean you have to know how all the services work. While the things to learn listed above are great to know practically, if you are solely focused on the front end of an application, you should not be expected to understand how the ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) or EMR (Elastic MapReduce) services work. But being able to know WHAT they are is extremely helpful as you work with the rest of your team.

Additional Tools to Manage AWS

While you certainly can be productive by working with each AWS service individually, there are tools that can help make working with those services even easier.