Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the pioneer in cloud computing, launching its offering over a decade ago, and it continues to rapidly introduce new services and features based on customer demand. AWS was developed by Amazon.com when the company decided to turn its expertise in building large-scale, reliable, and cost-efficient internet systems into a product that could be used by customers to host their own sites and services.

At the time of writing, AWS has 136 services listed on its web console, ranging from foundational services such as Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to high-level machine learning services such as Rekognition. The breadth and depth of the services that are available make it possible to implement almost any idea quickly and efficiently – your imagination is the only true limit to what you can do. But all of those services mean that you – as a developer, systems administrator, or solutions architect – have a lot to learn!

Luckily, we are here to help, and if you stick with us throughout the next 12 chapters, you will have a solid foundation for establishing yourself as an AWS expert.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Signing up for an AWS account
• Understanding AWS's global infrastructure
• Using the web console
• Learning the basics of AWS CloudFormation
• Using the AWS CLI