If your starting your journey with AWS then a clear sense of direction and destination is necessary in order for you to succeed in this venture. Amazon Web Services include a far-reaching set of services that translate into million possibilities. And this characteristic makes AWS a fun skill to learn.

This guide includes methodologies and strategies I have discovered during my journey from being a beginner to a person who has a better understanding of AWS. The key principle is to design a strategy specific to your learning style. And I’ll leave enough material for you to design your strategy.

I will be including a Resource Glossary for you to refer on my website (which I will be updating from time to time). Some video tutorials are also included in the complete version of this article on my website. Enjoy Learning AWS!

Getting Started

There is only one way to get started with AWS and that is:

Getting your hands dirty! Just create a free tier account and get started.

Choosing your Field of Expertise​

Choosing your field of expertise is important in order to define your direction. If you will start arbitrarily without choosing a specific field you will be lost in the sea of services AWS provides. Choose the area you are interested in after briefly researching various options available. And then you should systematically build your concepts. Some of the options include:

1. SysOps Engineer
2. DevOps Engineer
3. Developer
4. Security Engineer
5. Solutions Architect
6. Data Engineer

What should be the Grey Structure of your Learning Strategy?​

1. Start with familiarizing yourself with the basic services like IAM (Identity Access Management), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), S3 (Simple Storage Service) and VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).
2. For each service, you learn to start using the service to get hands-on experience.
3. Use that service in a small-scale project so that you can understand the usage and also challenges associated with the service. You can also publish this project to build your portfolio.
4. By the end learn best practices and security precautions to complete your learning cycle.

How to research a Field of Expertise?

In order to research an area of expertise such as Data Engineer or Solutions Architect, you can study the syllabus of that specific certification. Because the certification guide provided by AWS, clearly defines the knowledge associated with that role.

For instance, if you want to be Solutions Architect read the syllabus for Solutions Architect Associate and Professional Certification.

Resource Glossary for Beginners