Two deliverables that set up everything to come: an account a professional would sign off on, and proof you can explain AWS's physical reality in your own words.
Part 1: the hardened, billing-protected account
The complete Week 1 checklist, verified end-to-end:
- Root: MFA enabled, zero access keys, password in a manager, not used for daily work
- Admin IAM user: MFA, console + CLI access working
-
aws sts get-caller-identityreturns the admin user (not root) - Budgets: $5 and $20 with confirmed email alerts
- Cost Explorer enabled; Free Tier usage page located
- Weekly cost-check ritual scheduled
Part 2: the global infrastructure diagram
One page (draw.io, Excalidraw, or paper photographed), in your own words and layout — not a copy of AWS's marketing diagram:
- Show the hierarchy: Regions → AZs → the data centers inside them, plus edge locations as a separate layer.
- Annotate your chosen home Region and why you picked it (latency? Free Tier parity? curiosity?).
- Add two callouts: one explaining what an AZ failure means for a single-AZ app, one showing where the shared responsibility line sits for EC2 vs RDS.
- Quality bar: someone who's never heard of AWS should get the geography in 60 seconds.
Also due (ongoing threads begin)
- Trade-off journal, entry #1: "I chose Region X over Y because…" — one honest paragraph.
- First certification practice set: 10 Cloud Practitioner questions on cloud concepts (provided by your instructor) — score doesn't matter yet; calibration does.
Submit
Checklist screenshots + the diagram + journal entry. Grading: account hardening completeness (40%), diagram accuracy & clarity (35%), billing setup (15%), journal & practice habit started (10%).
Next week: IAM — the permission system that decides what every human and every service in your account may do. It's the least glamorous and most important service in AWS.