Cloud Concepts and the AWS Landscape
"The cloud" means renting computing resources on demand instead of buying hardware. You pay for what you use and can scale up or down in minutes. AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the largest provider; Google Cloud and Azure use the same ideas with different names.
Service models
| Model | You manage | Provider manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, app, data | hardware, network, virtualisation | EC2, Lightsail |
| PaaS | app and data | everything below | Render, Elastic Beanstalk, App Runner |
| SaaS | your settings and data | everything | Gmail, Stripe, Slack |
| Serverless | functions and data | servers and scaling entirely | Lambda, Vercel functions |
Moving up the table means less control but less work. PandaDev runs on Render (PaaS) precisely so its owner spends time on features, not servers.
Regions and availability zones
- A region is a geographic area (
eu-central-1Frankfurt,us-east-1N. Virginia). Choose one near your users and compliant with data rules such as GDPR. - Each region has several availability zones (AZs): separate data centres with independent power and networking. Spreading across two or more AZs survives the loss of one.
The shared responsibility model
AWS secures the cloud (data centres, hardware, the hypervisor). You secure what you put in the cloud: accounts, permissions, network rules, patching your servers, encrypting your data. Almost every cloud breach in the news is a customer misconfiguration: a public storage bucket, a leaked access key, an open database port.
The services worth learning first
| Need | AWS service |
|---|---|
| Identity and permissions | IAM |
| Virtual servers | EC2 |
| Object storage (files, backups) | S3 |
| Managed databases | RDS |
| Private networks | VPC |
| DNS | Route 53 |
| CDN | CloudFront |
| Functions | Lambda |
| Logs and metrics | CloudWatch |
| Containers | ECS, Fargate |
This track covers them in that order of importance.
Check yourself
- What is the difference between PaaS and IaaS?
- Why deploy across two availability zones?
- Under the shared responsibility model, who secures an S3 bucket's permissions?
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