AWS Tip Meister — Tip #6. A Tale of Two Tutorial Portals (AWS Sponsored, 224+ Free Hands-On Guides)

AWS Sponsored — Step-by-step tutorials to launch your first application and explore single and multi-service tutorials to get things done.

I am not complaining and definitely not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth. After all, the more the merrier, and these free tutorials are true gifts. Combined, both portals offer 200+ fantastic, well-prepared, high-quality tutorials (I haven’t examined overlap possibilities yet). There is no better way of getting hands-on with AWS than these collections.

I was a bit confused at first because they look remarkably similar but very quickly confirmed that they are indeed different and that’s the point of this post so that, like I, you’ll add both these references to your AWS quiver if not done so yet.

This would be a quick post containing links to both and sharing a little bit of experience on the quality claims I made above. Hope you come to the same conclusions after exploring both portals and trying out some labs on your own.

Portal 1 — Hands-on Tutorials — Get Started Step-by-Step

URL — https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/

For some reason, the page where I found this Tutorial Portal link is on the AWS Free Tier — Gain free, hands-on experience with the AWS products and services page. I don’t know why it says 10 minutes because maybe a few are 10 minutes long although I doubt it since I found the excellent information they provide, reading and digesting them alone, a very important task, will take much more than 10 minutes. Some of these tutorials can take up to 2 hours to finish. In any case, it’s a trifle that I am not going to quibble about.

I tried the following tutorial and it turned out to be a very rich learning. The whole tutorial consists of 5 modules. They provide not only great architectural insights involving quite a few critical services but also detailed step-by-step instructions on how to get them done. The recency and accuracy of the information are admirable as in the end this tutorial delivered the result. No struggle, no disappointment whatsoever.

All the best to try out on your own. I too can’t wait to embark on the same journey.

Portal 2— AWS Tutorials — Explore Single and Multi-Service Tutorials

URL — https://aws.amazon.com/tutorials/

I’ve already tried and written two tutorials from this portal, see both below, and that’s probably what led me to examine closely and nail the distinction when I came across the second one.

One thing I observed here is that some tutorials resemble the tutorials from the first portal, organized into modules, like Tip #3 above. The others are pretty heavy hands-on tutorials like Tip #4 involving Karpenter and the whole tutorial runs on a long single page.

The other observation is that I do see some tutorials are hosted on the AWS community site.

The bottom line is that this tutorial portal too is added to the journey of adventure with the first one and I am quite excited.

Conclusion and Next Steps

I discovered both of these tutorials accidentally as happens to be the case of finding anything on the over-crowded Amazon and AWS sites, a good problem to have because they churn out so many helpful resources at a frantic pace. As always, when I find bountiful resources containing high-quality hands-on labs or similar learning materials, I capture and share them for both my as well as your future references.

The next step from here on is to tackle each of the 200+ available tutorials one at a time and share my findings. I have a feeling we’re going to stay very busy learning over the next days, weeks, months, and possibly years.

See you soon!

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