What is this course about?

See why you should take this course and what you will learn.

We'll cover the following

What is this course about?

This is not AWS’s typical reference course. It doesn’t cover all of AWS or all its quirks. Instead, we want to help you realize which AWS features you’d be foolish not to use. Features for which you almost never need to consider alternatives. Features that have passed the test of time by being at the backbone of most things on the Internet.

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What to choose?

Making technical choices can be overwhelming. As developers, we have to make many choices from what seems like unlimited options. We have to choose:

  • a programming language
  • an application framework
  • a database
  • a cloud vendor
  • software dependencies
  • and many other things

AWS alone offers about 150 services, all with their own set of options and features, sometimes even overlapping with each other.

AWS Top 15 services
AWS Top 15 services

In this course, we will reveal a technique we use ourselves to help make reliable technical choices without getting paralyzed in the face of so many options. This technique will be presented in the context of AWS, but it can be generalized to any other technical decision.

Q

Which of the following is the central application in the AWS fleet of services?

A)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

B)

Amazon Simple Queue Service

C)

Amazon Simple Notification Service

D)

Amazon Simple Storage System

Found the above quiz hard? Don’t worry, you will get to know a lot about AWS services and best practices after finishing this course.

What to expect?

This is an opinionated course. We only cover topics we have significant first-hand experience with. You won’t find most of the knowledge we share here in the AWS docs.


In the next lesson, we will learn about the Default Heuristic technique.