Cloud Pro: AWS Management and Monitoring: Choose, Compare and Launch

What's inside

1. Level 1: The AWS Ops Toolbox on One PageFree
   Learn every AWS management and monitoring service on one map, sorted into seven groups (monitoring and logging, tracing, infrastructure as code, configuration and patching, inventory and governance, cost, advice and health), with current and former names and the services AWS is retiring.
2. Level 2: Write Your Standard Operations ProfileFree
   Learn to write the operations profile that drives every later choice: estate size and environments, telemetry volume and retention, SLOs and alerting, IaC and change control, patching, cost allocation, guardrails, team skills and cost model.
3. Level 3: CloudWatch Metrics and Alarms
   Learn when CloudWatch metrics and alarms are the right base layer for monitoring: their limits, what drives the bill (custom metrics, API calls, alarms, high-resolution data), and the smallest alarm stack you can launch and then tear down.
4. Level 4: CloudWatch Logs: Ingest, Retain, Query
   Learn how CloudWatch Logs charges for ingestion, storage, queries and log classes, which quotas bite, and how to set up a log group with retention, Logs Insights queries and metric filters.
5. Level 5: Application Signals and X-Ray Traces
   Learn how CloudWatch Application Signals and X-Ray deliver application performance monitoring, service maps and SLOs through OpenTelemetry, and why new work should not start on the X-Ray SDKs and daemon, which reach end of support in February 2027.
6. Level 6: Managed Grafana and Managed Prometheus
   Learn when Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Amazon Managed Grafana beat native CloudWatch, especially for Kubernetes and open-source teams, and what they cost per sample ingested, per query and per user.
7. Level 7: CloudFormation: Stacks, Change Sets, StackSets
   Learn CloudFormation as AWS's native infrastructure-as-code engine: stacks, change sets, StackSets, quotas such as template size and resource count, rollback behaviour, and its pricing model.
8. Level 8: The AWS CDK: Infrastructure in Real Code
   Learn how the AWS CDK generates CloudFormation from TypeScript or Python, where its construct levels help or hide complexity, and what bootstrapping, synth and diff add to your operations.
9. Level 9: Systems Manager: Patch, Run, Connect
   Learn Systems Manager's core tools (Fleet Manager, Session Manager, Run Command, Patch Manager, Parameter Store, Automation, OpsCenter), how standard and advanced managed-instance tiers are priced, and which tools are closed to new customers.
10. Level 10: Control Tower and Organizations in Brief
    Learn how Organizations and Control Tower give you a governed multi-account landing zone with organisational units, controls and Account Factory, and what that setup costs and constrains. Policy and security detail stays brief because the security course covered it.
11. Level 11: Service Catalog: Approved Self-Service
    Learn how Service Catalog lets platform teams publish approved, versioned products that other teams can launch themselves, how it compares with CDK or Terraform modules, and how AppRegistry is moving to maintenance.
12. Level 12: Resource Explorer: Find Anything, Anywhere
    Learn how Resource Explorer indexes resources across Regions and accounts, where it fits alongside tag editor, Config and inventory tools, and the limits on what it can search.
13. Level 13: AWS Config in Brief: Record and Evaluate
    Learn how AWS Config records configuration history and evaluates rules and conformance packs, how continuous and periodic recording drive the bill, and how to keep it brief yet useful for operations.
14. Level 14: Cost Explorer: See Where Money Goes
    Learn how Cost Explorer shows spend by service, account and tag, how its API requests and hourly or resource-level data are charged, and how it pairs with the Cost and Usage Report and Data Exports.
15. Level 15: Budgets and Cost Optimization Hub
    Learn how AWS Budgets and budget actions put spending limits in place, and how Cost Optimization Hub gathers savings recommendations across accounts into one ranked list.
16. Level 16: Compute Optimizer: Right-Size with Data
    Learn how Compute Optimizer recommends sizes for EC2, Auto Scaling groups, EBS, Lambda, ECS on Fargate and databases, how much metric history it needs, and what enhanced infrastructure metrics cost.
17. Level 17: Trusted Advisor: Checks and Support Tiers
    Learn which Trusted Advisor checks you get on each AWS Support plan, how it overlaps with Cost Optimization Hub, Security Hub and Compute Optimizer, and how to act on its findings across an organisation.
18. Level 18: AWS Health: Events That Affect You
    Learn how AWS Health reports account-specific service events, scheduled maintenance and retirement notices, and how to route those events into alerting and change planning across an organisation.
19. Level 19: SLOs and Alerts People Can Act On
    Learn to turn the profile's SLOs into error budgets, burn-rate alarms and routing so that every page is urgent, owned and actionable, using CloudWatch, Application Signals and Grafana together.
20. Level 20: IaC Drift and Change Control
    Learn how to detect, prevent and fix drift between code and reality using CloudFormation drift detection, terraform plan, Config and change sets, inside a change process that holds up at scale.
21. Level 21: Tagging and Cost Allocation That Holds Up
    Design a tagging scheme and turn it into reliable cost allocation, using cost allocation tags, tag policies, Cost Categories and split cost allocation data for shared containers, and handle the untagged and shared spend that every real bill contains.
22. Level 22: Running the FinOps Loop: Inform, Optimise, Operate
    Run a repeatable FinOps cycle on AWS that joins Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost Anomaly Detection, Cost Optimization Hub and Compute Optimizer into showback, rightsizing, commitment buying and unit-cost reporting that engineers act on.
23. Level 23: Multi-Account Operations with Delegated Admins
    Operate an organisation of many accounts from a few central ones: delegated administrators, CloudWatch cross-account observability, CloudFormation StackSets, Systems Manager across the organisation, and central log and Config aggregation.
24. Level 24: Fleet Operations: Patching, Automation and Incidents
    Run patching, routine automation and incident response across a fleet with Systems Manager, AWS Health and alarms, so that change is controlled, recorded and reversible when the estate grows to hundreds of instances.
25. Level 25: Worked Telemetry Cost for Two Estates
    Price the full telemetry bill (metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alarms, Managed Prometheus and Grafana) for a small startup estate and a large regulated estate, then apply the cost levers and show what each one saves.
26. Level 26: Building the Weighted Selection Scorecard
    Turn the standard operations profile into a weighted scorecard whose criteria, weights and scoring rules come from the profile's needs, so that choosing services is repeatable and can be defended.
27. Level 27: Scoring AWS Against Another Cloud with Dated Evidence
    Apply the scorecard to AWS and one other cloud's management and monitoring tools, backing every score with dated, citable evidence from official docs, pricing pages and quota tables instead of marketing claims.
28. Level 28: Final Challenge: Decision Workshop and Selection Record Exam
    Run a full decision workshop for a given estate that draws on the whole course, from the service map and operations profile through each service's limits and costs to the scorecard and cross-cloud comparison, and finish with a one-page selection record.

Access

The first 2 levels are free with a free account. Every level, the podcast edition and the AI tutor come with All Access at £4.99/month or any Creator plan — see pricing.

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