Course 1 - Foundations

This is the main course-level note. Use this page to maintain high-level summaries, key takeaways, and exam-critical information consolidated from all weekly notes.

Course Overview

At a Glance

Important Concepts to Revisit

1. Cloud Computing

Definition: The on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Key Benefits:

• Trade capital expense for variable expense.
• Massive economies of scale.
• Stop guessing capacity.
• Increase speed and agility.
• Stop spending money running data centers.
• Go global in minutes.

2. Global Infrastructure

• Regions: Separate geographic areas consisting of multiple AZs.
• Availability Zones (AZs): Isolated data centers within a Region. Used for High Availability (HA).
• Edge Locations: Used by CloudFront for content caching (low latency).

3. Service Models

• IaaS: You manage everything from OS up (e.g., EC2).
• PaaS: AWS manages OS/Hardware, you manage App/Data (e.g., Elastic Beanstalk).
• SaaS: Software provided as a finished product (e.g., Gmail).

4. Security Credentials

• Access Key ID & Secret Access Key: The username/password pair used for programmatic access (CLI/SDK). Never share these!

5. AI & Machine Learning

• Foundation Models (FMs): Large-scale models trained on vast amounts of unlabeled data using self-supervised learning (the basis of Generative AI).
• Generative AI Parameters:
  • Temperature: Controls randomness (High = Creative, Low = Predictable).
  • Top P: Controls the pool of words considered for generation.
• Amazon SageMaker: A comprehensive service to build, train, and deploy ML models.