This course offers a comprehensive guide for aspiring cloud practitioners interested in learning the complete lifecycle of virtual instance deployment and configuration on popular cloud platforms like AWS and Linode. The course starts right from the basics, where we explore various cloud computing service models. This includes infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. From there students gain hands-on experience with creating and administering remote virtual instances, complete with Ubuntu, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP. Students will learn the difference between popular web servers like Apache and NGINX, along with a detailed overview of various database management systems. This includes both SQL and NoSQL databases, in addition to database transaction standards such as ACID and CAP Theorem. In addition to a theoretical deep dive, the course demonstrates how to install, configure, and secure LAMP stack on Ubuntu for hosting dynamic, database driven web apps. We offer a detailed segment on server security, where students will configure both software and network firewalls for their instance using strict firewall policies, UFW and custom SSH ports. At this stage students will also learn to scale their servers both vertically and horizontally using application load balancers.
The second half of the course provides a comprehensive guide to Amazon Web Services. We start with demonstrating how to setup, secure, and navigate an AWS account. This includes setting up billing alerts and multi-factor authentication. From there, we take a deep dive into AWS Identity and Access management for enhanced account security, and the management of user accounts for various AWS services. Here we explore IAM User management and permissions, IAM Groups, IAM Policies, and access key rotation. Following the IAM section, we’ll jump into the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. In this module students lean to deploy virtual instances on AWS using Amazon Machine Images, Elastic IPs, and Launch Templates. We will also explore IAM roles for EC2, EC2 Security Groups, SSH key pair authentication, and remote administration using both terminal and EC2 Instance connect.
