Hello and welcome to the Introduction to Amazon Web Services course from CloudAcademy. In this course we'll be walking through the various services that make up AWS. You will learn about the basic services, have some idea of the general pricing schemes used, and understand how engineers would use the various services together to architect a web app.

As you may have been able to tell already, in order to complete this course you should have a basic understanding of cloud computing: what it is, how it works, why you'd use it, that kind of thing. This course focuses on the specifics of AWS within that context. If you don't feel comfortable with cloud computing you should take CloudAcademy's course called "What is Cloud Computing?" then come back to this one.

A little bit about myself, my name is Adrain M. Ryan. I'm a product manager and educator. I've been working in technology education for the last six years or so. You can learn a little bit more about me at my Twitter or my LinkedIn. I'm from Alaska originally and I live in New York City now, so quite the mix of backgrounds that I have.

A little bit about how this course is structured, this course will not go into detail on how to use any of the services that we talk about. We'll focus on the "what" and the "why" but not the "how". For that you should continue from this course into our Fundamentals of Amazon Web Services learning path. There we'll teach you how to actually use these services if you're an operations person or a developer.

Amazon Web Services is broken into several high level groupings of services. Each lecture in this course will take on one or two of those groupings. There are upwards of 50 specific services in AWS so we won't be going over all of them but we will touch on the most important ones within each grouping. We'll start with AWS Compute, move on to Storage and Databases, cover Networking, then continue on to various Management and Operational Tools, and then we'll have a wrap up with an overview of some of the services that have one very specific but deep use case.

At the end of this course you should have an understanding of the high level organization of AWS, be able to name the purpose of the most important AWS services, and navigate the AWS web portal. So let's begin, click on the "Next" button and we'll get started learning about AWS Compute.