Learn AWS Step By Step: Free Course with 3 Projects

Learn AWS Step By Step With 3 Projects is a free, beginner-level video course on Amazon Web Services fundamentals, taught through hands-on labs. It is for students, freshers, developers and IT professionals who want to understand the core AWS services and use them for real, from your first free tier account to designing a high availability infrastructure.

The course has 35 videos and about 5.3 hours of content on YouTube. Concept videos explain a service, and lab videos show you how to set it up in the AWS console. Because it starts with the free tier and a billing alarm, you learn to keep costs under control before you create anything. The full lesson list is on the AWS course page.

Who this course is for

Complete beginners to cloud who want a guided first look at AWS.
Students and freshers building practical cloud skills for their first job.
Developers who deploy apps and want to understand the servers, networks and storage behind them.
System administrators moving from on-premises work to the cloud.

The level is Beginner. You need no prior AWS experience; the course starts with core concepts, regions and the management console.

What you will learn

The 35 videos group into six themes.

1. AWS basics and your account. “Master AWS Core Concepts”, “AWS Regions Availability Zone Edge Locations”, “Setup Your Free AWS Tier Account”, “Understand AWS Management Console” and “Setup Free Tier Usage Billing Alarm”. Setting a billing alarm early is a habit every AWS learner should build.

2. Identity and access. “Understand Identity access management” (about 14 minutes) covers IAM, which controls who can do what in your account. Getting this right is the first step in AWS security.

3. Compute and storage for servers. Two EC2 lessons, two Elastic Block Storage lessons, “Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Explained”, “Master EC2 Bootstrap” and “Make EC2 Instance As Webserver”. By the end of this theme you have a running web server.

4. Networking with VPC. This is the largest theme: security groups, “AWS VPC: Subnets & CIDR Blocks Explained”, route tables, internet gateway, Elastic IPs, NAT, egress-only internet gateways, flow logs and NACLs, the default VPC and “Ultimate Guide to AWS Custom VPC” (about 18 minutes). Networking is where most beginners get stuck, so the course gives it plenty of time.

5. Scaling, monitoring and delivery. “AWS Cloud Watch”, “Ultimate Guide to AWS Elastic Load Balancing 2026”, two S3 lessons, two CloudFront lessons and “AWS Route 53” cover monitoring, spreading traffic, object storage, content delivery and DNS.

6. Databases and the final project. “Master AWS RDS” and “Hands-On AWS RDS Lab” cover managed databases. The course finishes with “Project: Design High Availabity AWS Infrastructure” (about 17 minutes), which brings the services together.

How the course is organised

35 videos, about 5.3 hours in total.
An 8-minute course introduction, then concepts and labs in a logical order: account and IAM, then compute, then networking, then scaling, storage, DNS and databases.
Many topics come as a pair: an “explained” or guide video followed by a hands-on lab.
The final video is the high availability infrastructure project.

How to study it step by step

Watch the course introduction to see the full route.
Create your free tier account and a billing alarm before anything else, exactly as shown. Check the alarm works.
Learn IAM and follow along in your own account.
Launch EC2 with EBS, learn AMIs and bootstrapping, then turn the instance into a web server.
Take networking slowly. Watch each VPC lesson, repeat it in the console, then build the custom VPC yourself without pausing the video, and compare.
Add CloudWatch, a load balancer, S3, CloudFront and Route 53, one at a time.
Set up RDS using the hands-on lab.
Build the high availability project, then delete the resources you no longer need so they do not keep running.

At three or four lessons a day, the course takes about two weeks with practice. The full course is also a YouTube playlist.

To automate what you built by hand, continue with Terraform Master Classes – AWS IaaS Automation, or learn configuration management with Step By Step Learn Ansible.

Frequently asked questions

Is this AWS course free?

Yes. All 35 videos are free to watch on YouTube. You can follow them from the course page or the playlist.

Do I need an AWS account?

To follow the labs, yes. The course shows you how to set up a free tier account and a free tier usage billing alarm early on, so you can watch your usage while you practise.

How long does the course take?

The videos total about 5.3 hours. With time to repeat each lab in your own account, most beginners take one to two weeks.

Is this course for an AWS certification exam?

It is not tied to a specific exam. It is a practical fundamentals course covering core services such as IAM, EC2, EBS, VPC, load balancing, S3, CloudFront, Route 53 and RDS.