One-day course · Sydney, Melbourne and online
AWS fundamentals for small teams
The 20% of AWS that covers 90% of what a growing company needs: accounts, access, networking, compute, storage, backups and the billing alerts that stop nasty surprises. Hands-on labs in a sandbox account, so nothing you try can break production.
Who it's for
People who are responsible for AWS without having been trained in it.
Developers
Who deploy to AWS but learned it by copying examples, and want to understand what they're doing.
IT generalists
Who look after Microsoft 365 and the network, and have now inherited the AWS account.
Technical founders
Who set up the account themselves and want to know what they should have done differently.
Engineering managers
Who need to make sensible decisions about cost, security and architecture.
What you'll be able to do
Confidence to run a small AWS environment safely and cheaply.
- Set up AWS accounts, single sign-on and permissions the way AWS recommends
- Understand VPCs, subnets and security groups well enough to spot a risky setup
- Choose between EC2, containers and Lambda for a given workload
- Pick the right storage and database service, and back it up properly
- Set budgets and alerts, and read the bill to find waste
- Know which settings to check first when reviewing an inherited account
Agenda
A full day, roughly half explanation and half hands-on labs.
- 9:00
Accounts and access
AWS Organizations, IAM Identity Center and least privilege. Lab: set up single sign-on and safe roles.
- 10:15
Networking without the jargon
VPCs, subnets, routing and security groups, explained with diagrams you'll keep.
- 11:15
Compute choices
EC2, containers on ECS and Fargate, and Lambda. When each makes sense. Lab: deploy the same app two ways.
- 13:30
Storage, databases and backups
S3, RDS, Aurora and DynamoDB, plus AWS Backup and testing a restore.
- 14:45
Cost control
Reading the bill, Cost Explorer, budgets, Savings Plans, and the common sources of waste. Lab: set up alerts.
- 15:45
Reviewing an inherited account
A checklist for the first hour in an AWS account you didn't set up.
What's included
Practical material you'll use the next time you log in.
- A sandbox AWS account for the labs
- An AWS account review checklist
- Terraform starter templates for accounts, budgets and backups
- Networking diagrams and a cheat sheet
- Slides and a certificate of completion
Common questions
Is this an AWS certification course?
No. It's focused on running a real environment well rather than passing an exam, though it's a good grounding if you plan to sit the AWS Cloud Practitioner or Solutions Architect Associate exams later.
Do I need my own AWS account?
No. We provide a sandbox account for every participant.
We use Azure. Is this useful?
The concepts transfer, but the labs are AWS-specific. Ask us about an in-house version for Azure.
Can you review our actual account as part of the course?
In an in-house session, yes. We can work through your own account with read-only access.
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Public sessions run monthly in Sydney, Melbourne and online. Register your interest and we'll send the next dates.