8 Great Tips to Learn AWS

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Operating Systems are not Dead yet !

Even if you haven’t worked on server and system administrations, you can do it ! You can learn AWS and this is what I want you to understand:

Operating Systems are not dead yet !

They will, and gradually, but IMHO not for the next 5 years !

Don’t start by learning AWS, learn Linux ( or Windows server if you’re a Microsoft fan).

Some people say that a DevOps is a modern System Administrator.Even if I don’t agree with this, DevOps is a culture before being a job, but somehow this could be true in some contexts..

The first thing you need to start learning is creating and managing an EC2 machine ! We’re still in the virtualization and the OS layers.

Start Simple !

Just like any other new thing to learn in IT and development, we always start by the famous Hello World example. Not this kind of Hello World but start by :

Creating a free tier EC2 machine on your default VPC, with a public IP with an open Security Group and default settings ! It will not be the most secured and optimised machine you’ll create but it’s okay to start.

If you’d like to learn at the same time :

• which type of EC2 instance to use,
• the settings of your Security Group,
• how Elastic Ip works,
• how tagging system works,
• how to create a subnet and how to use it,
• ..etc

You will have a lot of concepts to understand at the same time and you will lose your path of learning !

Start simple then move on to more complicated topics.

Study Networking

Even with AWS networking is simpler than on-premise networking systems, but learning how to :

• create a subnet
• make it public or private
• firewall concepts
• ports, Ip addresses and CIDR
• other networking stuff

is important.

Don’t learn networking for AWS, learn general concepts about networking and you’ll find it intuitive once you’ll try to use AWS.

Move Gradually to other Skills and Services

Acquiring new skills is a path where you must have the skill A to move to the skill B, so be patient and organised.

You will find some tens or probably thousands of services in AWS.

If you already have system and networking skills, it will be more and more easier to move and learn other AWS services.

Reverse Engineer like a Hacker

Try creating an AWS EC2 machine to host Wordpress, make it on a private subnet, create a public Nginx server, configure it to serve your Wordpress website, create another clone of your first machine, make Nginx load-balance the traffic to both servers ..

I know you can just start with ELB but there is nothing more helpful to learn a tool than reverse engineering it !

Don’t be Ashamed to Ask

I know that a beginner could have some questions that could be considered as a n00bie questions. But any expert started as a n00b before being an expert !

N00b questions are the most seen in stackoverflow and other stackexchange forums even if they received a negative number of votes.

In some forums, you may have answers like the let me google that for you answers but this doesn’t mean that you should not ask. Sure, finding the answer without any help is valuable and helps more than asking the first question that comes to your mind in a forum but don’t be ashamed to ask, if you need this.

DevOpsLinks community started a dedicated discussion board to the DevOps ecosystem. Join it, ask your questions and you’ll have answers without any prejudice — we are kind and helpful :-)

Online Communities

Learning is better when it’s social, you’ll find like-minded people from all levels and you will be up to date with topics that will interest you !

This is the purpose of DevOpsLinks, join us :-)

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