January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
254 pages
6h 48m
English
Content preview from AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) Study Guide
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Chapter 2. Getting Started with AWS
In this chapter, we’ll explore AWS, and you’ll learn what you need to know for the exam. To get started, you’ll need to set up an account. I’ll show you how to do this and fill you in on the benefits of the AWS Free Tier.
Then we’ll explore the AWS Management Console, and I’ll walk you through the most valuable AWS services, such as EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, and Lambda. I’ll also introduce AWS’s essential cost management tools. Understanding all these pieces will make the rest of AWS much easier to grasp.
Free Tier
If you’re just getting started with AWS, it’s worth taking a close look at the AWS Free Tier. It’s essentially Amazon’s way of letting you kick the tires on their massive cloud ecosystem without racking up a bill right away. But like most good things, the details matter.
There are actually three flavors of the Free Tier: a six-month offer, an always-available tier, and a set of short-term trials. Each one works a little differently, so let’s break them down.
Six-Month Free Tier
This one kicks in the moment you create a new AWS account. For the next six months, you get a monthly quota of popular services for free. This is essentially your cloud sandbox—with some guardrails.
You’ll get 750 hours of EC2 usage per month (enough to run a small instance 24/7), 5 GB of S3 storage, and 750 hours of a managed database using RDS, among other things. It’s plenty to host a low-traffic web app or tinker with a side project. Just keep an eye on the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.