Hey everyone. I hope you've been enjoying the course so far. We're going to do check-ins like this one after each major topic to review what you've learned. First things first, what is cloud computing and what does AWS offer? We define Cloud computing as the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. This means that you can make requests for IT resources like compute, networking, storage, analytics, or other types of resources, and then they are made available for you on demand. You don't pay for the resource upfront, instead, you just provision and pay at the end of the month. AWS offer services and many categories that you use together to create your solutions. We've only covered a few services so far. You've learned about Amazon EC2. With EC2, you can dynamically spin up and spin down virtual servers called EC2 instances. When you launch an EC2 instance, you choose the instance family. The instance family determines the hardware the instance runs on. You can have instances that are built for your specific purpose. The categories are general purpose, compute optimized, memory-optimized, accelerated computing and storage optimized. You can scale your EC2 instances either vertically by resizing the instance or horizontally by launching new instances and adding them to the pool. You can set up automated horizontal scaling using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. Once you've scaled your EC2 instances out horizontally, you need something to distribute the incoming traffic across those instances. This is where the Elastic Load Balancer comes into play. EC2 instances have different pricing models. There is on-demand, which is the most flexible and has no contract. Spot pricing, which allows you to utilize unused capacity at a discounted rate. Savings plans or reserved instances, which allow you to enter into a contract with AWS to get a discounted rate when you commit to a certain level of usage and savings plans which apply to AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, as well as EC2 instances. We also covered messaging services. There is Amazon Simple Queue Service or SQS. This service allows you to decouple system components. Messages remain in the queue until they are either consumed or deleted. Amazon Simple Notification Service or SNS is used for sending messages like emails, text messages, push notifications or even HTTP requests. Once a message is published, it is sent to all of the subscribers. You also learned that AWS has different types of compute services beyond just virtual servers like EC2. There are container services like Amazon Elastic Container Service or ECS, and there's Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service or EKS, both of which are container orchestration tools. You can use these tools with EC2 instances. But if you don't want to manage that, you don't need to. You can use AWS Fargate, which allows you to run your containers on top of a serverless compute platform. Then there is AWS Lambda, which allows you to just upload your code and configure it to run based on triggers. You only get charged for when the code is actually running, no containers, no virtual machines, just code and configuration. Hopefully, that sums it up. Catch you in the next one.