Learning cloud services

I've been working more with AWS cloud services to implement features for our infrastructure the last several months and thought to do a bit of a write-up on my workflow!

❓What exactly is a cloud computing service and what is AWS?

Cloud computing, cloud service is a paradigm in software development that encapsulates all the computing, storage, and databases for your web architecture and application and make them available over the internet from a remote server or network of servers.

AWS is Amazon Web Services and is one of the bigger cloud services that provides resources like database, security, storage and more.

Using cloud services is essentially how modern web applications are served today and can be beneficial as an engineer to have it under your tool belt. Learning cloud computing services can be helpful in understanding how the modern web ecosystem work. Albeit being quite complex, costly to develop and test new features, there are a ton of resources you can start with online.

First, if you don’t have an AWS, you can sign up for a Free Tier account to start testing the services. AWS provides all the necessary free training online but you would need to pay for testing and certification. After taking some fundamental courses, you can start to use some of the practical knowledge in your applications.

🌊 My workflow for working with AWS usually goes like:

1️⃣ Read the relevant document for the service I am working on ie. Security and Identity Access Management service

2️⃣ Read some the guides provided in the official docs for recommended practices by AWS

3️⃣ Because most of our services are built in Python, I use an AWS SDK called Boto3 to integrate the web application with the AWS service

4️⃣ Testing AWS locally can be a bit cumbersome and may be costly. I use a tool called Localstack that essentially emulates a local environment, allowing you to test your code without incurring the cost of deploying the actual services.

Let me know if you have any questions around which cloud service to start with or what resources to use!