AW S T E C H N I C A L E S S E N T I A L S T R A I N I N G C O U R S E S A N F R A N C I S C O - 2 / 2 3 / 1 6

S E V E N S L I D E R E V I E W D A R R E N A D K I N S O N

4 slides in Q & A format 3 slides with Tips

Q. What is it? A. One day training course, hands-on, instructor-led. Covers basics of S3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), RDS (Relational Database Service) based app, ELB (Elastic Load Balancing), general discussions on security, availability, cloud networking, console use, billing etc.

Q. How much, and is it worth it? A. $600 and yes, if you’re at the right experience level going in and you’re in a technical position (dev, sys admin, architect, tech marketing, eng management etc.). I paid for this course myself and I consider it good value.

Q. What experience level would gain the most from this course? A. Someone who’s spent an hour or two looking at AWS videos online, played around a bit with a free AWS account, read a few intro whitepapers. If you’ve worked with AWS for more than a couple of months you likely have found out most of what’s in this course already.

Q. Why not do it all yourself online? A. You probably could but it’d take longer, you wouldn’t have an instructor to ask questions of or other people in the class to share with and learn from.

Q. Is it full of marketing speak? A. There is a fair amount; it didn’t bother me too much. To an extent this is a technical survey of what AWS offers so it’s somewhat unavoidable (maybe I just drank the Kool-Aid already).

Q. What learning materials are there? A. You complete four labs by following instructions from an eLibrary Lab Guide. There is also a Student Guide in the eLibrary to which you have unlimited access afterwards. Wifi provided. The instructor covers a lot of non-lab material with slides and whiteboard.

Q. What do attendees need to bring? A. A laptop (running Chrome or Firefox). It’s good if you bring a Chromebook, iPad, etc as well so you can read the lab instructions alongside as you work through each lab on your laptop.

Q. What are the labs like? A. The four labs cover S3, EC2, ELB, and RDS and they take around 30 - 45min each to complete. You use a real AWS environment that Amazon pays for (qwiklabs). Other than one Mac gotcha (see “Tips”) everything worked very smoothly. One thing though is that you can blindly follow along “Select this”, “Do that”, “Type this” so you need to do your own thinking and research before and after the class. This isn’t especially a criticism since it’s a tough ask to cover this much material in one day.

Q. That’s a lot to cover in ~3hrs of lab time, no? A. It is indeed. You can’t possibly go away having “learned” how to use AWS but you get a flavor e.g. setting up compute instances, S3 buckets, elastic load balancing, relational dB, setting permissions, etc. It will become less intimidating and you’ll remember some stuff because you actually typed in instructions and made selections (hopefully in a mindful way). AWS is so vast and it changes so quickly that we’re all in a continuous learning environment anyway.

Q. What were your favorite parts? A. The instructor was very knowledgeable and helpful in answering questions; many of the other attendees gave valuable inputs and useful tips; I came away feeling I have a solid grasp of some cloud computing fundamentals and AWS in particular; good snacks!

Q. Least favorite parts? A. It felt a bit rushed in the second half of the day as we probably spent too much time on earlier discussions and diversions.

TIPS • Mac users should install the Windows Remote Desktop Client before

attending the class as Lab 2 has you spin up a Windows Server EC2 instance. As of 2/23/16 it was available here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-remote-desktop/id715768417

• There is an AWS Pop-up Loft in SF. Not really sure what it is, a kind of AWS playground with guest speakers and informal learning sessions, I think: https://aws.amazon.com/start-ups/loft/

TIPS • Whitepapers are here: Helpful intro papers from this page:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CiHBcqw6zc

• Great video on YouTube, “Your First Week on AWS”:

https://aws.amazon.com/tco-calculator/

• AWS Total Cost of Ownership Calculator:

https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/

https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/CAF/

TIPS • Cloud Adoption Framework can help organizations get started with AWS:

• If you’re interested in further AWS training or certification I’m told this guy has good training course on Udemy:

https://www.udemy.com/user/ryankroonenburg/