1️⃣ Week 1 — Cloud Foundations

Theme: Get hands-on with the AWS basics. Build a portfolio site on S3, deploy your first web server on EC2. Live session: Sat 23 May 2026 · 3 PM GMT Time commitment: 2 hr live + 4-6 hr labs

🎯 By the end of this week, you’ll have

  • ✅ A portfolio website live on the internet (hosted on S3 + CloudFront)
  • ✅ A web server running on EC2 with Nginx
  • ✅ A solid grasp of cloud fundamentals (regions, AZs, IAM, billing)
  • ✅ Hands-on experience with the AWS Console

📚 This week’s content

Item Type Time Link
🎬 Week 1 Slides Live session 2 hr slides/
🛠️ Lab 1 — S3 Portfolio Guided lab 60 min lab-1-s3-portfolio/
🛠️ Lab 2 — EC2 Web App Build-on-your-own 75 min lab-2-ec2-webapp/
🎯 Week 1 Quiz Interactive 15 min quiz/

📅 Suggested schedule

Day What to do
Sat 23 May Attend the live session (3 PM GMT). Open slides/ while watching.
Sun 24 May Work through Lab 1 (S3 Portfolio). Should take ~60 minutes.
Mon-Wed Work through Lab 2 (EC2 Web App). This one needs more thinking.
Thu 28 May Take the Week 1 Quiz. Push your solutions to your fork.
Fri 29 May Week 2 content drops — sync your fork: git fetch upstream && git merge upstream/main

🧠 Concepts we’ll cover

  • Cloud basics: What is cloud computing? Why AWS? Regions vs Availability Zones
  • The AWS Console: how to navigate, where the important menus live
  • S3: Object storage explained. Buckets, objects, public access, static hosting
  • CloudFront: CDN basics. Why your site loads fast in West Africa
  • EC2: Virtual machines in the cloud. AMIs, instance types, key pairs, security groups
  • IAM basics: Users, roles, policies. The principle of least privilege
  • Pricing & free tier: How not to get billed accidentally

💡 Tips for this week

  • Take screenshots of every step in the labs — they make the best blog posts later
  • Don’t skip the cleanup step at the end of each lab. EC2 left running = budget killer
  • The quiz is short but tricky — it’s designed to make you think, not memorize
  • Get unstuck quickly: WhatsApp the group with a screenshot before you’ve spent 30 minutes stuck

🆘 Common Week 1 issues

Problem Fix
“Access Denied” when uploading to S3 Bucket has Public Access blocked — see Lab 1 step 4
EC2 site won’t load Security group missing port 80 — see Lab 2 step 5
SSH key permission error chmod 400 your-key.pem on Mac/Linux
Region confusion Stick to ONE region — eu-west-1 is recommended

📦 What’s in slides/

  • Week1_CloudWithShad.pptx — the 11-slide deck used in the live session
  • Slides include speaker notes if you want to review what was said

📦 What’s in each lab folder

Each lab folder contains:

  • README.md — overview, requirements, success criteria
  • An HTML walkthrough (open it in your browser for the full step-by-step)
  • Any starter code or assets you’ll need

📦 What’s in quiz/

  • An interactive single-file HTML quiz — open in browser, no install needed
  • Tracks your score + streaks as you go

🎓 Submission

After finishing Lab 1 + Lab 2:

  1. Push to YOUR fork (not the original repo)
  2. Drop a screenshot of your live S3 site + EC2 site in the WhatsApp group
  3. Tag your post with #week1done
  4. Take the quiz — your score is just for you, no need to share

➡️ Next: Week 2 — Networking, Storage & Real Architectures ⬅️ Back to repo