Hey, everyone. I'm Chandan Werulkar, Computer Engineer, and I want to welcome you to this course. In this course, you will learn the key concepts behind cloud computing and explore AWS services using real-life examples covering compute, networking, storage, databases, security, and more. This course is intended for people working in IT or IT-related fields, who have a general knowledge of IT topics, but have yet to learn much about the AWS cloud.

  To kick off the course, we will cover the basics of what the cloud is, the benefits of the cloud, the AWS global infrastructure, and identity and access management. This will give you a solid foundation for learning the rest of the more technical topics contained in the course.

  Then we will focus on computing, and for this topic, we will dig into the services, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, AWS Container services like Amazon Elastic Container Service, and serverless compute options like AWS Lambda. Then we will discuss networking in AWS using services like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, and other networking technologies used for creating, securing, and connecting to your own private network in AWS. For storage, we'll explore how and when to use Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, and others.

  For databases, we will cover many use cases around the different database services AWS has to offer, but with a special focus on Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon DynamoDB. Then finally, we will discuss monitoring and scaling your application. For that, we'll use Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, alongside Elastic Load Balancing. We aren't going to focus on theory alone in this course. Instead, we will use a hands-on example through a cloud-based application that will build over the duration of the course piece by piece.

  The app we will build is an employee directory application that stores images and information about fictional employees in a company. There's no coding required for this course. You will have access to the source code if you want to explore it further. This course includes written segments we refer to as readings or notes, to reinforce ideas, dive deeper into topics, as well as provide background information on concepts we did not cover in the videos. Because of this, I highly suggest that you take the time to complete all of the readings to get the full benefit of the course. So again, welcome, and as we say at Amazon, work hard, have fun, and make history.