Yesterday I participated in AWS workshop held in Krakow. It was great introduction to AWS with hands on experience. I could play with services that I was not familiar with, like Amazon SageMaker, Polly or QuickSight.

Rapid pace, vast amount of knowledge and 9 exiting exercises!

Exercise 1: Preparations
Services: IAM, Cloud9, EC, AWS CLI
Goal: Prepare your environment (accounts and Cloud9) and provision first virtual server instance to check if everything works. All CLI commands were done via Cloud9.

Exercise 2: Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery
Services: CodeStar, CodeCommit, EC2, CLI
Goal: Create simple static HTML web page on EC2 instance in CodeStar, store your project source code on CodeCommit. Make sure that any changes (commits) in code are automatically populated to EC2 via CodeStar.

Exercise 3: Autoscaling and Infrastructure as a Code
Services: VPC, CloudFormation, ELB
Goal: Create autoscaling group based on CPU usage and configure load balancer to automatically add/remove servers from this group. Everything should be based on IaaC concept.

Exercise 4: Containers
Services: ECR, Fargate
Goal: Create container based on image from ECR. Here we used Fargete – container service without need of management of underlying servers.

Exercise 5: Real time data collection
Services: S3, Kinesis Firehose
Goal: Gather data from website using streams and store it in S3 bucket.

Exercise 6: Hadoop
Services: EMR, Athena
Goal: Create Hadoop cluster in EMR and feed it with customer data. Analyse this same data but using Athena.

Exercise 7: Business Intelligence
Services: QuickSight
Goal: Create QuickSight dashboard where you can analyse data from previous exercise.

Exercise 8: Serverless and AI
Services: Lambda, DynamoDB, Polly, API Gateway, SNS
Goal: Create application taking text files from S3 bucket and recognizing their language. Then sending text message with link to mp3 file containing recorded text to speech translation.

Exercise 9: Neural networks
Services: SageMaker
Goal: Build neural networks recognizing handwritten digits. We used sample notebook from AWS.
Last exercise was a homework and for doing it until certain deadline you could get 100$ credit for your AWS account.

Recommended

I strongly recommend this workshop, real practical experience from where you can start your AWS journey. It will be held in other cities so check if it will be somewhere nearby and sign up! For the details check cloudbuildersday.pl.