Quick Introduction To AWS
getting started with cloud computing and AWS
Introduction
In this article and subsequent others, I will be sharing the knowledge I have acquired on cloud computing in general and specifically the AWS cloud platform. Now a days, especially for machine learning engineers, data engineers, and data analysts, cloud computing is becomming indespensable part of their dialy work. So having at least the basic understanding of cloud computing is quite important.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the provision of computer hardware and software resources as a service over the web.
In other words, as long as you have a computer that has a browser and good internet connection, you can access and run any computer program on the cloud just like you can on your computer. The difference is when you are using a cloud service, the program or application you run on it is not limited by the capacity of the computer you are using to access the cloud service.
The Cloud: servers that are accessed over the Internet, and the software and databases that run on those servers
So basically, by using a really cheap laptop or desktop computer, you will be able to execute any workload you can think of; whether it is a very high gpu and cpu demanding machine learning task, creative design work, or even just running any game you want is possible using cloud computing. That is pretty darn cool if you ask me!!
And the best part of all these is that you can only pay for what you use. They call these the pay-as-you-go model of payment. There are also subscription models too. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Anyways, cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the internet. A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. These basically tells us who has access to the services.
So what kind of services can you get from cloud computing? Cloud computing services can be classified into three categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).
- Iaas: these are compute, storage, and network resources.
- Paas: provides a framework for application creation and deployment. Paas is built on Iaas services.
- Saas: web-based software deployment model that makes the software accessible through a web browser.
AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted public cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. In these and subsequent posts, I will be briefly discussing the AWS cloud platform. Without further ado, lets get started.
AWS Services: the different functionalities AWS serves to customers. customer’s interact with Services through API calls. these API calls can be sent using three different methods: AWS console (web based tool), AWS CLI(command line interface just like bash), and AWS SDKs for different programming languages.
I am going to be taking a hands on approach, so I will try my best to take you through the different cloud computing concepts in AWS step by step starting from creating AWS account.
Getting Started With AWS
the first thing we need to do is create AWS account
AWS account: An AWS account is a container for your AWS resources. You create and manage your AWS resources in an AWS account. for any paid services you use in your account the bill for the services will be addressed to the account.
AWS Resources: for beginners, the difference between an AWS resource and service might be a bit confusing, but in short AWS resource is anything a user creates inside an AWS account using a given AWS service. For example, Using the IAM service one can create IAM users, so IAM is the service and the created users are the resources. as mentioned above, we use API calls to interact with services and create and manage resources.
First Lets Create AWS account.
in order to create an AWS account you need to have the following
- working email address
- a debit card or credit card with 1 us dollar in it.
- 5 minutes of your time.
Step 1: go to the AWS signup web page and fill in your email and account name. your account name can be anything you want. and on the follow up page provide a strong password for your account.
Step 2: provide your contact details
Step 3: provide your debit or credit card information. AWS will not charge you anything at this stage, but they will hold 1 us dollar until they verify your identity. AWS uses the information you provide here for billing you later on if you use paid services outside the free tier.
Step 4 complete the verification steps that follow, and you will finish creating your account. for the purpose of these tutorial, don’t forget to select the free plan. once you finish the verification and plan selection process you should see the following page
Step 5: Once you finish creating your account, you need to login as a root user using the email address and password you used to create your account.
Congratulations, now you can access what ever AWS services you want and different AWS learning resources as well to help you understand the services.
by the way, there are a number of free aws services you can use without incurring any chargs whatsoever. some of these free services are free only for the first 12 months of newly created account and others are always free. before you start using any aws service you need to clearly understand its cost information. I will show you how you can check weather a service is free or not and also show you how you can manage your spending on aws in future tutorials.
For now, you can explore the different free AWS learning resources and lab projects available through your account. In order to access these resources you need to login to the AWS skill builder platform using your AWS account credentials.
Conclusion
In these tutorial I have given you a short introduction to AWS and showed you the steps to create AWS account. In the coming few weeks we will be going deeper and deeper into the different AWS services together in a step by step manner.
Next, I will be discussing a couple of very essential AWS services: the IAM service and the IAM Identity Center service.