edX AWS Developer: Building on AWS

By Adrian | January 28, 2019

So in my AWS studies I came across a course from edX titled “AWS Developer: Building on AWS”. This is an awesome course that gives you hands on experience with multiple services in AWS. Its structured in such a way where each week will only take a few hours to complete and there are 6 weeks of courses. If I recall as long as you are not “overly testing” your solution (which would have to be significant) you are unlikely to go over the free tier on AWS.

The concepts and proposed architectures are well explained, walked through by the instructor and then you have a lab to complete. Its followed up with a short quiz. I really felt like they were guiding the solution from beginning to end showing how to troubleshoot and improve on the solution as each week progressed.

While there is a bit of coding within the course, its all provided so you can literally just use what they provide OR improve on it along the way. Knowing Python and Flask would obviously help but its not all that hard to follow what the code is doing.

By the end of the course you have touched the following AWS Services in one way or another.

  • VPC
  • CloudFormation
  • IAM
  • boto3 SDK
  • Cloud9 IDE
  • Rekognition
  • Lambda
  • EC2
  • Load Balancers
  • RDS
  • S3
  • Cognito
  • Certificate Manager
  • X-Ray
  • SNS
  • SQS
  • Polly (optional challenge)

Overall, really enjoyed the course and even better, its free (but you can choice to pay for the certificate if you want one.)