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The best online AWS training: free, discounted, and paid training resources

By Nicola Wright

Looking to boost your AWS know-how? You’re in the right place.

Whether you’re searching for a new role, simply want to polish up your skills, or you’re an AWS customer interested in bolstering your users’ cloud abilities, there’s no shortage of AWS training resources out there to suit every budget.

Let’s take a look at the best online AWS training to help you start upskilling today. We’ve highlighted the best AWS courses for you to tackle — both paid, discounted, and free AWS training – as well as some of the fantastic expert instructors whose content will help you on your development journey.

This is by no means a definitive list, so if you’ve come across any great AWS training or learning resources, drop us a tweet and we’ll add it in!

Free AWS training

AWS Learning Library

AWS itself offers an enormous collection of training and education content that can be accessed for free and consumed at your own pace, and the AWS Learning Library is an excellent place to start.

A digital treasure trove of e-learning, here you can find over 370 bitesize courses that can be filtered by theme, role, and skill level: there’s something for everyone here.

The free courses range in length from a few minutes to several hours, so you’ll always have time to squeeze a few in on the fly, and are delivered either through e-learning content or video.

To help you get the most out of your personal development, AWS has created several learning paths that group together relevant courses — this is what makes the Learning Library one of the best AWS training resources available for free.

Some of these paths are role-based, designed to help you build the skills needed to advance your career.

Others are solution-based, focusing on developing your ability to use and deploy specialized AWS services like advanced networking, databases, storage, or machine learning.

AWS Skill Builder (free)

AWS also offer online training through AWS Skill Builder.

While access to some of these resources requires a paid subscription, AWS Skill Builder also offers over 500 on-demand courses and learning plans to help professionals craft and hone cloud skills.

With AWS Certification Official Practice Question Sets and recommended learning paths that enable you to dive deeper into different roles and solutions within AWS, Skill Builder is one of the best free AWS training resources for those looking to learn directly from internal AWS experts.

Free AWS courses on Udemy

Udemy offers many of its best AWS courses for free. Here are just a few of the most highly rated options.

Course highlights

Cloud Computing With Amazon Web Services

Cloud Computing With Amazon Web Services was developed to offer an accessible, beginner’s introduction to cloud computing concepts and terminologies, and the core services provided by AWS. Learn the fundamentals of how to create virtual servers, configure monitoring services, configure storage services, and set up your own cloud infrastructure.

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Amazon Web Services – Learning and Implementing AWS Solution

A little more granular, this course aims to help strengthen your knowledge of end to end AWS implementation. Teaching you more about major components like S3, EC2, and RDB, this course will give you the foundation needed to springboard into more advanced areas of AWS.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Zero to Hero

More than 100,000 people have taken this course, which teaches some of the building-block skills needed to work with AWS, no matter what your previous experience is. Find out how to create an AWS EC2 WordPress web server, launch and connect to an AWS RDS relational database, create back-ends for NodeJS applications with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, manage files with S3, send emails with SES, use CloudWatch, and use the Command Line Interface.

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Free AWS courses on Coursera

Coursera AWS courses are free to view. You will need to pay if you want to take the quizzes and earn certifications, though.

You can pay for these on an individual basis, or sign up to Coursera Plus for $59 a month. This subscription can be canceled at any time, so the faster you learn, the more you save.

Course highlights

DevOps on AWS Specialization

This intermediate-level, three-month program is split across four courses, and teaches you how to use the combination of DevOps philosophies, practices and tools to develop, deploy, and maintain applications in the AWS Cloud.

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AWS Fundamentals: Addressing Security Risk

Developed by AWS itself, this course will take you through a different aspect of AWS security every week. Starting with basic concepts like Least Privilege and AWS IAM, you’ll move on to learn about architecting secure infrastructure, data protection, and protecting compute resources like Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda.

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Building Containerized Applications on AWS

This course is all about containers on AWS, and how to use them to modernize your cloud apps. It looks at the most popular ways to deploy them on AWS, and how to manage container functions like starting, stopping, and scaling.

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Top Coursera tutors

Morgan Willis is a Senior Cloud Technologist at AWS, and a top-rated author of courses on containerization, DynamoDB, and going cloud-native. The holder of four AWS certifications, Morgan has been sharing her knowledge as a technical instructor and mentor for many years alongside her career as a software developer and all-around cloud maven.

Picture of Alana

Alana Layton is an experienced technical trainer, technical content developer, and cloud engineer living out of Seattle, Washington. Her career has included teaching about AWS all over the world, creating AWS content that is fun, and working in consulting. She currently holds six AWS certifications.


Free AWS video courses from ExamPro

AWS Community Hero and creator of freeCodeCamp, Andrew Brown has been publishing a mix of free and paid AWS learning materials for current and aspiring AWS professionals alike over the last few years.

Alongside freeCodeCamp’s online courses, Andrew’s ExamPro YouTube channel has almost 2,500 videos covering a range of technical problems you might encounter on the job, as well as practical advice on how to register and prep for AWS certification exams. What makes these amongst the best online AWS training materials available for free? These videos are thorough. No, really thorough.

Between the Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect, and Developer certification videos alone there’s 25+hours of free learning materials!

The ExamPro website also offers an assortment of cheat sheets, flashcards, study guides, and quizzes covering the different AWS cloud certification paths, which you can buy for a discounted price.

Video highlights

AWS Certified Cloud Practioner – full course

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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – full course

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AWS Certified Developer (Associate) – full course

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Discounted AWS training

WhizLabs

WhizLabs is an online training provider specializing in certification training and preparation.

There are 10 AWS certifications options available; covering each of AWS’s official certifications and diving into various specialist topics.

Courses include extensive learning content encompassing the syllabus of each certification, hands-on labs to give you under-the-hood experience of AWS products and services, and practice exams to help you get ready to sit your big test.

WhizLabs also offers an addition 20 videos, tests, and hands-on labs on various other areas of AWS, from cost optimization to building data lakes.

Pricing

Depending on the certification involved, WhizLabs training courses usually sit between $30 and $100, with practice exam packages available for around $25 to $50 extra. Though their courses are paid, WhizLabs is almost always running some kind of discount – just click through to the course you’re interested in to see what’s on offer.

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Udemy

There are almost 300 AWS courses for all levels on Udemy, from wide-ranging introductory courses to product deep-dives and certification exam prep, benefiting over 3 million learners to date.

Pricing

Udemy’s paid courses tend to cost around $40-70, but they’re almost always heavily discounted in some way: if you see one you like that’s not on offer, it’s worth signing up for email alerts, as it likely won’t be long before the price comes down. There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee if your chosen course isn’t what you’re looking for.


Top Udemy tutors


Neal Davis is a certified AWS Solutions Architect, best-selling author, and instructor. He has over two decades of experience in IT and has authored six highly rated AWS courses on Udemy.

 

Stephane Maarek is a 9x AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Developer Associate whose 31 AWS courses are among the best selling on Udemy. Also a consultant and software developer, Stephane has a particular interest in all things related to big data, cloud, and API.


 

Jon Bonso is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Certified Developer, who has authored six top-selling AWS courses to help fellow cloud enthusiasts prepare for AWS certification exams.


Educative

Educative is an online training platform for all kinds of coding skills. Educative’s courses are text-based and are peppered with embedded coding environments, so that users can practice what they’ve learned and get practical experience.

Most of Educative’s content is language-specific rather than product-specific, though there are a handful of explicitly AWS-related courses which we’ve noted below.

For those interested in developing on or for AWS, however, Educative remains a great shout thanks to its extensive content on programming and development topics.

Pricing

There are two ways to purchase online AWS training with Educative: courses and learning tracks can be bought individually, or you can buy a subscription that gets you access to all its 500+ courses and project for a flat monthly fee of $24. Right now though, a monthly subscription is available at a discount!

Course highlights

Learn the A to Z of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

This wide-ranging introductory course was designed by three AWS Solution Certified Architects to teach budding AWS professionals and users about core services like compute, storage, networking services. You’ll also learn about identity, mobile, routing, and security and find out how they all work together to give you an in-depth comprehension of the AWS cloud.

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The Good Parts of AWS: Cutting Through the Clutter

Created by an ex-Amazon engineer with 15 years of experience working on the platform, this course aims to share a different take than other AWS reference content, offering proprietary knowledge and showcasing “features that have passed the test of time by being at the backbone of most things on the Internet.”

Among the things you’ll learn throughout this course is a technique to help make reliable technical choices, plus an overview of core AWS services like DynamoDB, S3, and EC2 and how, why, and if you should use it in your business

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A Programmer’s Guide to AWS S3

This course consists of 32 lessons that deep dive into all things S3. You can learn everything you need to know about one of AWS’ most popular offerings, as well as gaining hands-on experience with AWS’ security features and how to monitor and manage an AWS-hosted storage solution.

Aimed at entry-level programmers looking to polish up their cloud skills, you should be able to use the console and command-line interface (CLI) to perform complex operations and host a static website using S3 upon course completion.

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Top Educative tutors


 

Daniel Vassallo is a self-employed indie maker and founder of Userbase, who previously helped build a small part of AWS during his time there between 2010 and 2019.

 

Gojko Adzic is a 2019 AWS Serverless Hero, the winner of the 2016 European Software Testing Outstanding Achievement Award, and the 2011 Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Award. Gojko’s book Specification by Example won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012, and his blog won the UK Agile Award for the best online publication in 2010.


Paid AWS training

LinkedIn Learning

Formerly known as Lynda, LinkedIn’s wide-ranging training brand LinkedIn Learning is packed with some of the best AWS courses and learning materials designed to help sharpen up users’ AWS skills.

Courses are produced by AWS professionals and experts, with options for technical and non-technical cloud users alike.

Pricing

LinkedIn Learning is available on a subscription basis, with access to all courses available for $39.99 per month or $239.88 for the year if paid annually. Some courses are also available to buy separately without needing a subscription to access — these typically range from $20 to $50.

Course highlights

Amazon Web Services: Data Services

This course will show you the ropes when it comes to everything data service related on AWS, from storage and framework options to relational and NoSQL data storage, data warehousing, graph and ledger databases, and data lakes. You’ll also learn how to run open-source processing tools such as Hadoop and Spark on AWS and take advantage of cutting-edge serverless tools like Athena and Aurora Serverless.

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AWS: Storage and Data Management

Learn how to configure object storage solutions and lifecycle management in AWS’s most popular storage product, Amazon S3. The course also covers making the most of flexible network storage with Amazon EFS, as well as how to use AWS Glue to move and transform data.

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Introduction to AWS for Non-Engineers: 3 Core Services

Part of a special series to help non-technical types learn about AWS, this course gives users a non-technical introduction to AWS core services. You’ll get an accessible overview of key AWS technology such as compute options, storage, database, and network and content delivery services—a practical choice for end-users looking to find out which services to use for which business tasks.

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Top LinkedIn Learning tutors


 

Bear Cahill is a freelance application developer who’s worked on over 100 mobile apps. He’s authored 14 LinkedIn Learning courses on AWS to date, covering topics including Identity Access Management, React, and AWS Amplify.

 

Tom Carpenter is the chief technical officer at CWNP (Certified Wireless Network Professionals). He’s created a series of ten courses for LinkedIn Learning AWS, which take an in-depth look at the know-how needed to become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate.


 

Lynn Langit is an AWS Hero who has authored many AWS and cloud-related courses on LinkedIn Learning. A cloud architect, Lynn specializes in big data projects and has extensive experience with products like AWS Athena, Aurora, Redshift, Kinesis, and the IoT. Her courses cover topics like Amazon Workspaces, AWS for DevOps, and AWS for Data Science.

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Cloud Academy

Cloud Academy is a colossal online library of training courses covering all kinds of hands-on technical skills.

Their online training is split up into learning paths, making it easy for you to know where to start and how to progress.

These paths don’t just cover career-centric routes like skilling up for a specific job role or preparing for a certification, but also practical tasks such as migrating a business to the cloud.

There are currently hundreds of AWS courses, set along over 50 different learning paths that cover all levels from foundational, introductory knowledge to advanced specialisms like security and machine learning.

Most of them are less than sixty minutes long, meaning they’re super digestible and easy to squeeze into your day and making Cloud Academy one of the best AWS training destinations when time isn’t on your side.

Pricing

Individuals can get access to the library, which boasts more than 10,000 hours of training materials and over 500 practical labs, for $39 a month.

Course highlights

Build AWS Serverless Web Applications With Python

In this hands-on course, you’ll be walked through the building of a serverless web application using Python 3.6. By the end, you’ll have learned how to use the likes of Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, and Cognito, and have created your very own multi-user to-do list application based on Vue.js.
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Introduction to the Amazon Internet of Things (IoT) Service

In this course, you’ll get a detailed introduction to the Internet of Things and the features, configurations, and benefits of the Amazon IoT. You’ll learn all about the various components that make up the Amazon IoT service, like Device SDK, Device Security, Device Gateway, Registry, Rules Engine, and Device Shadows, and find out when, why, and how to use it through practical use cases.

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Top Cloud Academy tutors


Stuart Scott has been working within the IT industry for two decades. To date, he has created 60+ courses relating to the AWS cloud, focusing mainly on security and compliance. AWS certified and accredited, Stuart is also a published author and recipient of the 2015 Expert of the Year Award from Experts Exchange.


A Cloud Guru

A Cloud Guru is an online learning platform that mixes fun, hands-on digital learning with video and labs, that give you first-hand experience with real AWS products.

A Cloud Guru was born from one AWS professional’s discontentment with the dull, expensive AWS training on the market, and aims to make AWS both accessible and enjoyable to learn about. As a result, its little surprise that A Cloud Guru makes our list of the best AWS training courses available.

Choose from more than 100 AWS courses ranging from absolute beginner-level knowledge to specialties that cover everything from cost optimization and best practices to scaling Docker containers and working with Dynamo DB.

There’s also prep courses for each of AWS’s  certifications if you’re planning on taking on an exam.

A Cloud Guru also offers hands-on labs and learning paths that walk you through tasks like setting up AWS CLIs and guided projects that teach you how to build cool things on AWS.

Pricing

Pricing for individuals starts at $35 per month, dropping to $29 if paid annually.

Course highlights

Introduction to Amazon RDS

Packed with all the knowledge required to leverage the power of AWS’s relational database service in your project, this course covers topics like read replicas, high availability, scaling, pricing, backups and restores, failovers, monitoring and many other things you need to know about to run a production-ready database in AWS.

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Mastering the AWS Well-Architected Framework

In this course, AWS Community Hero Mark Nunnikhoven takes you through the main points of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and teaches you how to apply them to your organization. Using real-world problems and use cases to promote a practice understanding of the framework, this course will equip you with everything you need to know to build on AWS.

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Introduction to Governance and Compliance on AWS

On this high-level tour of the AWS landscape, you’ll learn all about compliance and governance tools and services in order to build knowledge of various compliance types, services such as Audit Manager and Security Hub, and administering AWS accounts and service controls with AWS Organizations and Control Tower.

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Top A Cloud Guru tutors


Ryan Kroonenburg is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect and AWS Certified Developer. With 17 years’ experience in IT, Ryan has worked in cloud computing since its birth, and has made it his mission to bring the benefits of the cloud to everyone. With his training content, Ryan aims to accommodate both absolute beginners, as well as professionals.

 

Faye Ellis is a twenty-year veteran of the IT industry and has worked on business-critical systems across numerous sectors. Passionate about cloud technology, Faye understands how important it is to keep your skills sharp and relevant to get you access to the best opportunities on the market.


Mattias Andersson is a software savant, having worked in roles such as architecture, coding, project management, security, training, mentoring, and team leadership since 2001. A bonafide AWS expert, he achieved all five AWS Pro and Associate certifications in just five months, scoring over 90% on each one.


Pluralsight

Pluralsight is a digital learning platform geared toward tech professionals. It offers a library of thousands of courses authored by more than 1,500 expert instructors.

There are currently more than 200 AWS-related courses on Pluralsight, with a good chunk of those aimed at intermediate level learners.

Pricing

$24 a month, or $245 for the whole year, gets you access to courses, paths, and skills assessments. If you want access to interactive courses, exams, and projects, it’s $370, which covers you for 12 months.

Course highlights

Understanding AWS Core Services

A great choice if you’re preparing to take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, this course offers an introduction to the core AWS services that will likely crop up during the test.

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Introduction to Security and Architecture on AWS

Security and architecture are vital parts of the AWS cloud; this course will aim to show you how to bolster your cloud platform with an introduction to architectural concepts, security best practices, and an overview of the AWS services that support these areas.

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Implementing AWS Load Balancing

If you want to implement highly available and scalable applications on the AWS cloud platform, you’ll need to understand how the Elastic Load Balancing service works. This course delves into that, as well as how to deploy load balancers on AWS.

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Data Engineering with AWS Machine Learning

As the old saying on data analysis goes, garbage in, garbage out. The results you get from machine learning solutions depend enormously on the data you’re feeding them, meaning how you store and organize information is hugely important. This course will teach you how to select the best AWS data storage and ingestion service for any given ML task, and you’ll find out how to turn raw, unprocessed data into properly formatted information that AWS ML solutions can make the most of.

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Serverless Analytics on AWS

Serverless technology hasn’t just revolutionized compute in the cloud; it’s having a big impact on analytics too. In this course, you’ll find out how having one centralized data source for all your structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data silos alike can help you efficiently perform advanced analytical tasks without affecting the original data. Learn how to use AWS tools to cut down data prep, analyze your data faster, and the AI and ML best practices you need to know about to futureproof your workflows.

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Top Pluralsight tutors

Mike Pfeiffer headshot

Mike Pfeiffer is a twenty year IT industry veteran, published author, and international conference speaker. He’s a former architect for AWS and engineer for Microsoft. Today Pfeiffer serves as Chief Technologist at CloudSkills.io.

David Tucker headshot

David Tucker is a Webby Award winning cloud development consultant that focuses on cloud native web, mobile, and IoT applications. For over fifteen years as a consultant David has led custom software development on emerging platforms for companies such as FedEx, AT&T, Sony Music, Intel, Comcast, Herman Miller, Principal Financial, and Adobe (as well as many others).


Intellipaat 

Intellipaat is an online training platform that covers many aspects of cloud computing, and takes a career-focused approach to upskilling, offering 24/7 support for learners as well as help with resumes and interview prep.

Pricing

Intellipaat’s AWS courses cost around $700 for 30 hours of instructor-led training, one-on-one support sessions, and lifetime access to course content.

Course highlights

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Training

This AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional training is an instructor-led certification program curated by experts and covering AWS services such as Amazon SNS, Route 53,  Amazon VPC, and Amazon S3. The course will take you through designing well-architected infrastructure and services, IAM, cloud deployment best practices, and disaster recovery.

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