Developing on AWS equips professional developers with the skills and mental models required to deliver production-grade software on the AWS platform. Rather than treating AWS as a set of disjointed services, this course shows how to compose those services into cohesive architectures that are secure by design, observable by default, and engineered for change.

We begin by establishing a developer’s toolkit for the cloud: using the AWS SDK and CLI effectively, authenticating with IAM Identity Center or access keys, and adopting patterns that keep credentials secure. You will practice working with core building blocks—Amazon S3 for durable object storage, Amazon DynamoDB for low-latency NoSQL data access, and Amazon RDS for relational needs—and learn when to choose each based on consistency, throughput, and cost profiles.

From there, we move into modern application integration. You will build stateless compute with AWS Lambda, front it with Amazon API Gateway, and coordinate business flows with AWS Step Functions. We’ll decouple components using Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS, discuss idempotency and retries, and implement patterns that gracefully handle partial failures. For teams standardizing on containers, we’ll compare Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS from a developer workflow perspective and show how to integrate them with managed data and messaging services.

Security is woven through every module. You will apply IAM policies with least privilege, protect data with KMS-backed encryption, handle secrets properly with AWS Secrets Manager and Parameter Store, and instrument services for auditability. We also focus on performance and cost—caching with Amazon CloudFront and DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), selecting the right compute and database capacity models, and using cost-aware design to avoid bill shock.

Shipping matters. You’ll implement CI/CD using AWS CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodePipeline (and see how to bring in GitHub or GitLab). For infrastructure, we compare AWS CloudFormation and the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), emphasizing reviewable, testable deployments. Observability is made concrete with Amazon CloudWatch metrics and logs, AWS X-Ray tracing, and structured logging that turns production into a feedback loop for developers.

Every day includes hands-on labs that reinforce learning: building a serverless API with authentication, event-driven processing with durable retries, and an automated pipeline that validates, deploys, and rolls back applications. We conclude with a capstone exercise that ties together security, resiliency, and automation into a cohesive release. Graduates leave with working code, deployable patterns, and a roadmap to the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam.