AWS is a very large landlord. It owns the buildings, the power, the network and the hardware, and rents you pieces of it by the hour, by the gigabyte or by the request. Each piece is a service: a place to store files, a virtual machine, a database. You never see the hardware. You see an API.
Services have short names that you will type constantly. The three this course uses most:
| Short name | What it is |
|---|---|
| S3 | storage for files of any size |
| EC2 | virtual machines |
| IAM | who may do what |
Regions and zones
The hardware lives in regions: separate geographies such as us-east-1 (Virginia) and eu-west-1 (Ireland). Most things you create live in one region and cannot see the others. You pick a region for where your users are, where the law says data must stay, and what it costs.
Inside a region are availability zones: us-east-1a, us-east-1b, us-east-1c. A zone is one or more data centres with their own power and network. Anything that must survive a data-centre failure is spread across zones; later chapters do exactly that.
Your first command
aws ec2 describe-regionsaws is the program. ec2 is the service you are asking; it runs virtual machines, and it also keeps the map of regions. describe-regions is the question. The answer is a list, one entry per region:
{
"RegionName": "eu-west-1",
"Endpoint": "ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com"
}Every command you will ever type has this shape: aws, a service, a question or an order. Lesson 3 takes it apart properly.
One API, several doors
You can click through a web console, type into the command line, or call AWS from code. All three make the same API calls against the same account, so a thing created one way shows up every other way. This course lives in the command line, because it is exact, repeatable and what every script and pipeline uses.
Who secures what
AWS is responsible for security of the cloud: buildings, hardware, the software that slices machines into virtual ones. You are responsible for security in the cloud: who may log in, which ports are open, whether the operating system on your machine is patched.
What you will build
One application, the Monster Market, grows through the course: a static site in this chapter, then a server, a database, a load balancer, DNS and a CDN. By the end of this chapter the site is live on a public URL.