Free preview · Beginner · 16 min read
Understand AWS as a programmable platform: accounts, APIs, managed services, responsibility boundaries, architecture trade-offs, and the cloud engineer’s operating model.
AWS is not just a collection of services. For a cloud engineer it is a programmable operating environment made of accounts, identities, APIs, networks, compute, data services, observability systems and automation boundaries.
REQUIREMENT
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SERVICE SELECTION
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IDENTITY + NETWORK + DATA BOUNDARIES
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AUTOMATION / IaC
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DEPLOY
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OBSERVE
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SECURE + SCALE + OPTIMIZE
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RECOVER / IMPROVE
A cloud engineer must be able to answer four questions for every workload:
AWS operates the cloud infrastructure. You remain responsible for how you configure and use cloud services. The exact boundary changes by service type.
| Model | AWS manages more of | You manage more of |
|---|---|---|
| EC2 | facilities, physical hardware, virtualization | guest OS, patches, app runtime, security groups, data |
| RDS | database infrastructure and many operational tasks | schema, users, queries, data, configuration choices |
| Lambda | servers and runtime infrastructure | function code, permissions, configuration, dependencies |
| S3 | storage infrastructure | bucket policy, object permissions, encryption choices, lifecycle |
| Need | Common AWS choice |
|---|---|
| virtual machine | EC2 |
| object storage | S3 |
| block storage | EBS |
| shared file system | EFS |
| relational database | RDS / Aurora |
| NoSQL key-value/document | DynamoDB |
| cache | ElastiCache |
| HTTP load balancing | ALB |
| TCP/UDP load balancing | NLB |
| DNS | Route 53 |
| CDN | CloudFront |
| containers | ECS / Fargate / EKS |
| functions | Lambda |
| messaging | SQS / SNS / EventBridge |
| metrics/logs/alarms | CloudWatch |
| API audit history | CloudTrail |
| remote server operations | Systems Manager |
AWS Well-Architected thinking can be reduced to questions cloud engineers ask daily: