AWS Fundamentals

Summary

• This section covers the core building blocks you should understand before diving into individual AWS services: compute, storage, networking, IAM, pricing, and the Well-Architected Framework.
• The goal is to give you a mental model of the platform so you can reason about architectures, trade-offs, and costs, not just individual APIs.
• Once you’re comfortable here, you can move into service-specific clusters like 03-services with much more confidence.

Fundamentals map

mindmap
  root((AWS Fundamentals))
    Compute
      EC2
      Containers (ECS/EKS/Fargate)
      Lambda
    Storage
      S3
      EBS
      EFS
      Glacier
    Networking
      VPC
      Subnets
      Security Groups & NACLs
    IAM
      Users & Roles
      Policies
      Permissions boundaries
    Pricing & Billing
      Pricing models
      Cost tools
    Well-Architected
      6 pillars
      Design principles

Best Practices

• Treat fundamentals as shared knowledge: whether you focus on compute, data, or security, you’ll repeatedly use these concepts.
• When reading, always ask: “Where does this fit in the overall architecture? Which pillar of Well-Architected does it influence?”
• Try to connect each fundamental topic with at least one simple lab (for example, create a VPC, configure a Security Group, launch EC2, store an object in S3).

Topics in this section

• Compute Overview
• Storage Overview
• Networking Overview
• IAM Basics
• Pricing & Billing
• Well-Architected Overview