AWS Academy Cloud Foundations Module 01 Student Guide: 100-ACCLFO-20-EN-SG

AWS Academy Cloud Foundations
Module 01 Student Guide

Version 2.0.6
100-ACCLFO-20-EN-SG
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AWS Academy Cloud Foundations AWS Academy Cloud Foundations
Contents
Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview 4
© 2021 Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 3
AWS Academy Cloud Foundations Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview
Welcome to Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview.
This module addresses the following topics:

• Introduction to cloud computing
• Advantages of cloud computing
• Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
Finally, you will be asked to complete a knowledge check that will be used to test your
understanding of the key concepts that are covered in this module.
After completing this module, you should be able to:

• Define different types of cloud computing
• Describe six advantages of cloud computing
• Recognize the main AWS service categories and core services
• Review the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
Section 1: Introduction to cloud computing
What does cloud computing mean to you?
Take a moment to think of what cloud computing means to you and write a short sentence.
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database, storage,

applications, and other IT resources via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. These
resources run on server computers that are located in large data centers in different
locations around the world. When you use a cloud service provider like AWS, that service
provider owns the computers that you are using. These resources can be used together like
building blocks to build solutions that help meet business goals and satisfy technology
requirements.
To learn more about cloud computing and how it works, see this AWS webpage.
Cloud computing enables you to stop thinking of your infrastructure as hardware, and instead
think of (and use) it as software. But what does this mean?
In the traditional computing model, infrastructure is thought of as hardware. Hardware

solutions are physical, which means they require space, staff, physical security, planning, and
capital expenditure.
In addition to significant upfront investment, another prohibitive aspect of traditional

computing is the long hardware procurement cycle that involves acquiring, provisioning, and
maintaining on-premises infrastructure.
With a hardware solution, you must ask if there is enough resource capacity or sufficient
storage to meet your needs, and you provision capacity by guessing theoretical maximum
peaks. If you don’t meet your projected maximum peak, then you pay for expensive
resources that stay idle. If you exceed your projected maximum peak, then you don’t have
sufficient capacity to meet your needs. And if your needs change, then you must spend the
time, effort, and money required to implement a new solution.
For example, if you wanted to provision a new website, you would need to buy the hardware,
rack and stack it, put it in a data center, and then manage it or have someone else manage it.
This approach is expensive and time-consuming.
By contrast, cloud computing enables you to think of your infrastructure as software.

Software solutions are flexible. You can select the cloud services that best match your needs,
provision and terminate those resources on-demand, and pay for what you use. You can
elastically scale resources up and down in an automated fashion. With the cloud computing
model, you can treat resources as temporary and disposable. The flexibility that cloud
computing offers enables businesses to implement new solutions quickly and with low
upfront costs.
Compared to hardware solutions, software solutions can change much more quickly, easily,
and cost-effectively.
Cloud computing helps developers and IT departments avoid undifferentiated work like
procurement, maintenance, and capacity planning, thus enabling them to focus on what
matters most.
As cloud computing has grown in popularity, several different service models and
deployment strategies have emerged to help meet the specific needs of different users. Each
type of cloud service model and deployment strategy provides you with a different level of
control, flexibility, and management. Understanding the differences between these cloud
service models and deployment strategies can help you decide what set of services is right
for your needs.
There are three main cloud service models. Each model represents a different part of the
cloud computing stack and gives you a different level of control over your IT resources:
• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Services in this category are the basic building blocks for
cloud IT and typically provide you with access to networking features, computers (virtual
or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS provides you with the highest
level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is the most similar to
existing IT resources that many IT departments and developers are familiar with today.
• Platform as a service (PaaS): Services in this category reduce the need for you to manage
the underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems) and enable you to
focus on the deployment and management of your applications.
• Software as a service (SaaS): Services in this category provide you with a completed
product that the service provider runs and manages. In most cases, software as a service
refers to end-user applications. With a SaaS offering, you do not have to think about how
the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You need to
think only about how you plan to use that particular piece of software. A common
example of a SaaS application is web-based email, where you can send and receive email
without managing feature additions to the email product or maintaining the servers and
operating systems that the email program runs on.
There are three main cloud computing deployment models, which represent the cloud
environments that your applications can be deployed in:
• Cloud: A cloud-based application is fully deployed in the cloud, and all parts of the
application run in the cloud. Applications in the cloud have either been created in the
cloud or have been migrated from an existing infrastructure to take advantage of the
benefits of cloud computing. Cloud-based applications can be built on low-level
infrastructure pieces or they can use higher-level services that provide abstraction from
the management, architecting, and scaling requirements of core infrastructure.
• Hybrid: A hybrid deployment is a way to connect infrastructure and applications between

cloud-based resources and existing resources that are not located in the cloud. The most
common method of hybrid deployment is between the cloud and existing on-premises
infrastructure. This model enables an organization to extend and grow their infrastructure
into the cloud while connecting cloud resources to internal systems.
• On-premises: Deploying resources on-premises, using virtualization and resource

management tools, is sometimes called private cloud. While on-premises deployment
does not provide many of the benefits of cloud computing, it is sometimes sought for its
ability to provide dedicated resources. In most cases, this deployment model is the same
as legacy IT infrastructure, but it might also use application management and virtualization
technologies to increase resource utilization.
There are many similarities between AWS and the traditional, on-premises IT space:
• AWS security groups, network access control lists (network ACLs), and AWS Identity and
Access Management (IAM) are similar to firewalls, access control lists (ACLs), and
administrators.
• Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) are similar to
routers, network pipelines, and switches.
• Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
instances are similar to on-premises servers.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS),
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service
(Amazon RDS) are similar to direct attached storage (DAS), storage area networks (SAN),
network attached storage (NAS), and a relational database management service (RDBMS).
With AWS services and features, you can do almost everything that you would want to do
with a traditional data center.
Some key takeaways from this section of the module include:

• Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the internet with pay-as-
you-go pricing.
• Cloud computing enables you to think of (and use) your infrastructure as software.
• There are three cloud service models: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
• There are three cloud deployment models: cloud, hybrid, and on-premises or private
cloud.
• There are many AWS service analogs for the traditional, on-premises IT space.
Section 2: Advantages of cloud computing
Why are so many companies interested in moving to the cloud? This section presents six
advantages of cloud computing.
Advantage #1—Trade capital expense for variable expense: Capital expenses (capex) are
funds that a company uses to acquire, upgrade, and maintain physical assets such as
property, industrial buildings, or equipment. Do you remember the data center example in
the traditional computing model where you needed to rack and stack the hardware, and then
manage it all? You must pay for everything in the data center whether you use it or not.
By contrast, a variable expense is an expense that the person who bears the cost can easily
alter or avoid. Instead of investing heavily in data centers and servers before you know how
you will use them, you can pay only when you consume resources and pay only for the
amount you consume. Thus, you save money on technology. It also enables you to adapt to
new applications with as much space as you need in minutes, instead of weeks or days.
Maintenance is reduced, so you can spend focus more on the core goals of your business.
Advantage #2—Benefit from massive economies of scale: By using cloud computing, you
can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from
hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, providers such as AWS can
achieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay-as-you-go prices.
Advantage #3—Stop guessing capacity: Eliminate guessing about your infrastructure

capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision before you deploy an application, you
often either have expensive idle resources or deal with limited capacity. With cloud
computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little as you need, and
scale up and down as required with only a few minutes’ notice.
Advantage #4—Increase speed and agility: In a cloud computing environment, new IT

resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time it takes to make those
resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. The result is a dramatic
increase in agility for the organization because the cost and time that it takes to experiment
and develop are significantly lower.
Advantage #5—Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers: Focus on
projects that differentiate your business instead of focusing on the infrastructure. Cloud
computing enables you to focus on your own customers instead of the heavy lifting of
racking, stacking, and powering servers.
Advantage #6—Go global in minutes: You can deploy your application in multiple AWS
Regions around the world with just a few clicks. As a result, you can provide a lower latency
and better experience for your customers simply and at minimal cost.
The key takeaways from this section of the module include the six advantages of cloud
computing:
• Trade capital expense for variable expense
• Massive economies of scale
• Stop guessing capacity
• Increase speed and agility
• Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers
• Go global in minutes
Section 3: Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
In general, a web service is any piece of software that makes itself available over the internet
or on private (intranet) networks. A web service uses a standardized format—such as
Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)—for the request
and the response of an application programming interface (API) interaction. It is not tied to
any one operating system or programming language. It’s self-describing via an interface
definition file and it is discoverable.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set of global cloud-
based products. Because these products are delivered over the internet, you have on-demand
access to the compute, storage, network, database, and other IT resources that you might need
for your projects—and the tools to manage them. You can immediately provision and launch AWS
resources. The resources are ready for you to use in minutes.
AWS offers flexibility. Your AWS environment can be reconfigured and updated on demand,
scaled up or down automatically to meet usage patterns and optimize spending, or shut down
temporarily or permanently. The billing for AWS services becomes an operational expense
instead of a capital expense.
AWS services are designed to work together to support virtually any type of application or
workload. Think of these services like building blocks, which you can assemble quickly to build
sophisticated, scalable solutions, and then adjust them as your needs change.
AWS services fall under different categories, and each category contains one or more
services. You can select the services that you want from these different categories to build
your solutions.
For example, say you’re building a database application. Your customers might be sending
data to your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which is a service in the
compute category. These EC2 servers batch the data in one-minute increments and add an
object per customer to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), the AWS storage service
you’ve chosen to use. You can then use a nonrelational database like Amazon DynamoDB to
power your application, for example, to build an index so that you can find all the objects for
a given customer that were collected over a certain period. You might decide to run these
services inside an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which is a service in the
networking category.
The purpose of this simple example is to illustrate that you can select web services from
different categories and use them together to build a solution (in this case, a database
application). Of course, the solutions you build can be quite complex.
Which service you choose to use will depend on your business goals and technology
requirements. In the example you just looked at, the solution made use of Amazon EC2 as the
compute service. However, that is only one of many compute services that AWS offers. Here
are some other AWS compute offerings that you might choose to use for the following
example use cases:
• Amazon EC2: You want complete control over your AWS computing resources.
• AWS Lambda: You want to run your code and not manage or provision servers.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: You want a service that deploys, manages, and scales your web
applications for you.
• Amazon Lightsail: You need a lightweight cloud platform for a simple web application.
• AWS Batch: You need to run hundreds of thousands of batch workloads.
• AWS Outposts: You want to run AWS infrastructure in your on-premises data center.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
(Amazon EKS), or AWS Fargate: You want to implement a containers or microservices
architecture.
• VMware Cloud on AWS: You have an on-premises server virtualization platform that you
want to migrate to AWS.
Similarly, there are a variety of services for you to choose from in the other categories, and
the number of offerings keeps growing.
The array of AWS services can be intimidating as you start your journey into the cloud. This
course focuses on some of the more common services in the following service categories:
compute, storage, database, networking and content delivery, security, identity, and
compliance, management and governance, and AWS cost management.
Legend:
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
You might wonder how to access the broad array of services that are offered by AWS. There
are three ways to create and manage resources on the AWS Cloud:
• AWS Management Console: The console provides a rich graphical interface to a majority
of the features offered by AWS. (Note: From time to time, new features might not have all
of their capabilities included in the console when the feature initially launches.)
• AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI): The AWS CLI provides a suite of utilities that
can be launched from a command script in Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows.
• Software development kits (SDKs): AWS provides packages that enable accessing AWS in
a variety of popular programming languages. This makes it easy to use AWS in your
existing applications and it also enables you to create applications that deploy and
monitor complex systems entirely through code.
All three options are built on a common REST-like API that serves as the foundation of AWS.
To learn more about tools you can use to develop and manage applications on AWS, see
Tools to Build on AWS.
The key takeaways from this section of the module include:

• AWS is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set of global cloud-based products
called services that are designed to work together.
• There are many categories of AWS services, and each category has many services to
choose from.
• Choose a service based on your business goals and technology requirements.
• There are three ways to interact with AWS services.
Section 4: Moving to the AWS Cloud – The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
As you learned so far in this module, cloud computing offers many advantages over the
traditional model. However, for most organizations, cloud adoption does not happen
instantly. Technology is one thing, but an organization also consists of people and processes,
and these three elements must all be in alignment for successful cloud adoption. Cloud
computing introduces a significant shift in how technology is obtained, used, and managed. It
also shifts how organizations budget and pay for technology services. Cloud adoption
requires that fundamental changes are discussed and considered across an entire
organization. It also requires that stakeholders across all organizational units—both within
and outside IT—support these new changes. In this last section, you learn about the AWS
CAF, which was created to help organizations design and travel an accelerated path to
successful cloud adoption.
Each organization’s cloud adoption journey is unique. However, in order for any organization
to successfully migrate its IT portfolio to the cloud, three elements (that is, people, process,
and technology) must be in alignment. Business and technology leaders in an organization
must understand the organization’s current state, target state, and the transition that is
needed to achieve the target state so they can set goals and create processes for staff.
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) provides guidance and best practices to help
organizations identify gaps in skills and processes. It also helps organizations build a
comprehensive approach to cloud computing—both across the organization and throughout
the IT lifecycle—to accelerate successful cloud adoption.
At the highest level, the AWS CAF organizes guidance into six areas of focus, called
perspectives. Perspectives span people, processes, and technology. Each perspective consists
of a set of capabilities, which covers distinct responsibilities that are owned or managed by
functionally related stakeholders.
Capabilities within each perspective are used to identify which areas of an organization
require attention. By identifying gaps, prescriptive work streams can be created that support
a successful cloud journey.
In general, the Business, People, and Governance perspectives focus on business capabilities,
while the Platform, Security, and Operations perspectives focus on technical capabilities.
Stakeholders from the Business perspective (for example, business managers, finance
managers, budget owners, and strategy stakeholders) can use the AWS CAF to create a
strong business case for cloud adoption and prioritize cloud adoption initiatives. Stakeholders
should ensure that an organization’s business strategies and goals align with its IT strategies
and goals.
Stakeholders from the People perspective (for example, human resources, staffing, and
people managers) can use the AWS CAF to evaluate organizational structures and roles, new
skill and process requirements, and identify gaps. Performing an analysis of needs and gaps
can help prioritize training, staffing, and organizational changes to build an agile organization.
Stakeholders from the Governance perspective (for example, the Chief Information Officer or
CIO, program managers, enterprise architects, business analysts, and portfolio managers) can
use the AWS CAF to focus on the skills and processes that are needed to align IT strategy and
goals with business strategy and goals. This focus helps the organization maximize the
business value of its IT investment and minimize the business risks.
Stakeholders from the Platform perspective (for example, Chief Technology Officer or CTO, IT
managers, and solutions architects) use a variety of architectural dimensions and models to
understand and communicate the nature of IT systems and their relationships. They must be
able to describe the architecture of the target state environment in detail. The AWS CAF
includes principles and patterns for implementing new solutions on the cloud, and for
migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud.
Stakeholders from the Security perspective (for example, Chief Information Security Officer
or CISO, IT security managers, and IT security analysts) must ensure that the organization
meets security objectives for visibility, auditability, control, and agility. Security perspective
stakeholders can use the AWS CAF to structure the selection and implementation of security
controls that meet the organization’s needs.
Stakeholders from the Operations perspective (for example, IT operations managers and IT
support managers) define how day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter, and year-to-year business is
conducted. Stakeholders from the Operations perspective align with and support the
operations of the business. The AWS CAF helps these stakeholders define current operating
procedures. It also helps them identify the process changes and training that are needed to
implement successful cloud adoption.
The key takeaways from this section of the module include:

• Cloud adoption is not instantaneous for most organizations and requires a thoughtful,
deliberate strategy and alignment across the whole organization.
• The AWS CAF was created to help organizations develop efficient and effective plans for
their cloud adoption journey.
• The AWS CAF organizes guidance into six areas of focus, called perspectives.
• Perspectives consist of sets of business or technology capabilities that are the
responsibility of key stakeholders.
It’s now time to review the module, and wrap up with a knowledge check and discussion of a
practice certification exam question.
In summary, in this module you learned how to:

• Define different types of cloud computing
• Describe six advantages of cloud computing
• Recognize the main AWS service categories and core services
• Reviewed the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
To finish this module, complete the knowledge check.
Now, complete the knowledge check.
Look at the answer choices and rule them out based on the keywords that were previously
highlighted.
If you want to learn more about the topics covered in this module, you might find the
following additional resources helpful:
• What is AWS? YouTube video
• Cloud computing with AWS website
• Overview of Amazon Web Services whitepaper
• An Overview of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework whitepaper
Thanks for participating!

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Module 01 Student Guide

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Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview 4

Welcome to Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview.

This module addresses the following topics:

After completing this module, you should be able to:

Section 1: Introduction to cloud computing

What does cloud computing mean to you?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database, storage,

In the traditional computing model, infrastructure is thought of as hardware. Hardware

In addition to significant upfront investment, another prohibitive aspect of traditional

By contrast, cloud computing enables you to think of your infrastructure as software.

• Hybrid: A hybrid deployment is a way to connect infrastructure and applications between

• On-premises: Deploying resources on-premises, using virtualization and resource

Some key takeaways from this section of the module include:

Section 2: Advantages of cloud computing

Advantage #3—Stop guessing capacity: Eliminate guessing about your infrastructure

Advantage #4—Increase speed and agility: In a cloud computing environment, new IT

Section 3: Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The key takeaways from this section of the module include:

The key takeaways from this section of the module include:

In summary, in this module you learned how to:

To finish this module, complete the knowledge check.

Now, complete the knowledge check.

Thanks for participating!

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