From increases in productivity, uptime, and performance to continuous access to the latest features and security tools, there are many benefits to migrating your infrastructure to the AWS cloud.

Yet another is access to a wide range of knowledge resources and training programs published by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team and their trusted partners, including documentation, labs, webinars, and training courses to help your organization get the most out of deployment. 

In fact, there is so much out there that the team at Think|Stack wanted to take a moment and compile a list of the top six AWS workshops that you probably didn’t know existed but are sure to boost your knowledge.

Without further ado, here are six AWS workshops you should check out:

1. Amazon EKS Workshop

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EWS) is AWS’ native managed Kubernetes service that makes it easier for organizations to run Kubernetes in their AWS deployment in the cloud or on-premise. 

Amazon EKS Workshop graphic

In addition to covering how to configure VPC, ALB, and EC2 Kubernetes workers, the Amazon EKS Workshop provides a great overview of many other features to better deploy, scale, and manage your containerized applications. You can watch the entire series or just jump to particular topics, including:

  • Deployments
  • Health checks
  • Dashboards
  • Exposing services
  • Deploying Jenkins
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • X-ray
  • Service meshes

2. Amazon ECS Workshop for AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate gives organizations the ability to abstract container host clusters and services away from the user of the service and without having to manage them directly, helping to streamline the management of computing resources.

Amazon ECS Workshop for AWS Fargate graphic 

The Amazon ECS Workshop for AWS Farget walks you through how to set up, scale, and manage applications using ECS on Fargate using front-end and back-end services. As the course goes on, learners will learn more about how Amazon ECS helps manage the services through the real-time map the application creates.

3. Amazon EC2 Spot Workshops

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances give organizations the ability to tap into spare computing resources available on the AWS Cloud with large discounts when compared to on-demand instances

The Amazon EC2 Spot Workshops walk organizations through how to take advantage of these additional computing resources, which instances they are a good fit for, and how to manage them as part of your larger deployment.

Other topics include:

  • Autoscaling
  • Launching spot instances
  • SageMaker
  • Spot Instances with EKS
  • CI/CD

4. Real-Time Streaming with Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis “makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data,” providing the information organizations need to make data-driven decisions about their application usage and performance.

Amazon Kinesis workshop graphic

However, learning how to organize, triage, and utilize all of this information can be challenging. That’s why we recommend the Kinesis AWS workshops, which include labs that cover:

  • Ingestion
  • Turning data into Kinesis Data Streams
  • Kinesis Data Firehose
  • Data analytics
  • Real-time stream processing pipeline

5. Amazon DynamoDB

DynamoDB is Amazon’s serverless, key-value, and easily scalable NoSQL database made to help organizations run high-performance applications. DynamoDB also offers native security controls, access to continuous data backups, a host of data export tools, and much more. With so much power and flexibility, organizations can do everything from developing and running software apps to delivering personalized e-commerce experiences.

To help organizations take advantage of all of these features, Amazon put together the Amazon DynamoDB Labs, consisting of intermediate-level exercises to accelerate one’s understanding of the CLI and AWS Management Console.

The labs also include topics such as:

  • Advanced design patterns
  • Data modeling and design challenges
  • NoSQL design principles

6. Athena 

In a time with high levels of data from enterprise applications, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and IoT, Amazon Athena helps organizations better analyze structured and unstructured data streams. The technology also helps with running ad-hoc queries, creating reports, and generating visualizations data directly from Amazon S3. As with other AWS services, Athena is scalable, only requiring organizations to pay for the queries that they run, no matter the size or nature of the data sets.

These AWS workshops include:

  • Athena basics
  • Federated queries
  • User-defined functions
  • Machine learning
  • Text analysis

How to Stay on Top of the Latest in AWS

I hope you get some value from these AWS workshops and labs! If you do, I hope you take a moment to share them with others.

And if you want to continue to stay on top of the latest in all things cloud and AWS, then you should make sure to subscribe to the Think | Stack blog here

I also recommend checking out the amazing AWS transformations experienced by one of our customers, documented here in the Typewriter Transformation case study.

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