aws

Two things reliably surprise teams new to AWS: the network they must build before anything can talk, and an invoice driven by charges nobody chose deliberately. The two are connected, because moving data is where much of the cost hides. This lesson covers the virtual network primitives, the traffic charges that follow from them, and how to read a bill.

Cloud storage looks like a long product list and is really three physical shapes, object, block and file, each with an access pattern it is built for and one it is bad at. This lesson covers those three, the difference between durability and availability that people conflate, what eleven nines actually means at scale, and how to choose a database by access pattern.

AWS offers several ways to run code, and they are not competitors so much as points on one spectrum trading control for operational relief. This lesson walks that spectrum from virtual machines to serverless functions, what you hand over at each step, the cold-start and state constraints that decide fit, and the honest cases where serverless is the wrong answer.

AWS offers hundreds of services, which makes it look like a catalogue to memorise. It is not. This lesson gives the four structures everything else hangs from: the physical geography of regions and availability zones, the account as a blast-radius boundary, IAM as the one gatekeeper every call passes, and the responsibility line between you and the provider.

Three services decide whether an agent survives contact with production: what it remembers between sessions, whose authority it acts with when it calls your systems, and whether you can reconstruct what it did after the fact. This lesson covers AgentCore Memory, Identity and Observability, and the delegation problem that makes agent authentication genuinely different.

An agent is only as useful as the things it can do, and connecting many agents to many tools is a multiplication problem that gets expensive fast. This lesson covers what AgentCore Gateway converts into tools and how, the semantic search that stops tool overload, the two directions of authentication, and the managed sandboxes for code and browsing.

An agent is a loop that runs for minutes, holds state, executes code it just wrote, and must not leak anything into the next user's session. This lesson covers what AgentCore Runtime provides that a container does not, why session isolation is the load-bearing guarantee, and where the managed Harness sits against bringing your own loop.

Amazon Bedrock's pitch is that model choice becomes a configuration value instead of a rewrite. This lesson takes that claim apart: the four API dialects Bedrock exposes over the same models, what the unified Converse API actually normalises, what it cannot normalise, and the inference and governance machinery that decides cost and blast radius.