You get through this without creating an AWS account. Lessons that call APIs reproduce them locally with moto, and every figure for pricing, latency and start-up time is measured rather than imagined. IaaS and PaaS, VMs, containers and serverless, S3, VPC, IAM, monitoring and IaC. Twenty lessons that take you to designing one small service yourself.
The 20 lessons are grouped into five chapters. Working through them in order is the best way, but you are welcome to dip into whatever interests you. Note: nothing here bills you. Lessons that touch APIs use moto, a library that reproduces the AWS API locally.
You do not use it because it is cheap. You use it because you can switch off the hours you do not need, and because you do not have to wait. Counting IaaS against PaaS by the chores left to you, the latency distance creates, and the four multipliers on your bill.
Virtual machines, containers and serverless. Size by p95 rather than by the average, confirm why containers are fast with measured start-up times, and meet the most common serverless accident.
S3 has no folders and cannot append. The conditions under which a cheaper storage class costs more, how to choose a database, and why "we have backups" and "we can restore" are different claims.
Public and private in a VPC, the evaluation order in IAM where Deny wins, what encryption actually protects against, and why an error-rate threshold stops meaning anything at low volume.
Spreading across AZs, decoupling with a queue, letting IaC compute "desired minus current", and signing discount commitments last. It ends with one design document that also records what you left out.
Once you have finished all 20 lessons, run containers for real in Kubernetes for Beginners, or go a layer down with Networking Fundamentals. Membership unlocks every course.