Your first AWS calls
The cloud is not a place you log into and click around — it's an API. Every
button in the AWS console, every line of Terraform, every deploy script ends up
making the same kind of request: "Hey AWS, do this thing," signed with your
credentials. The aws command-line tool is the most direct way to make those
requests yourself, and learning it makes everything above it (Terraform included)
stop feeling like magic.
In this track you run real aws commands against a safe, throwaway mock AWS,
so you can create and inspect things freely without a cloud bill or a real account.
No endpoint flags needed. Normally you'd configure credentials and a region; here the platform points the CLI at the mock AWS for you. Focus on the commands.
Your script builds up across the steps: each step opens with the previous step's script in the editor. The sandbox is fresh on every run, so keep your earlier lines.
Interview prep
Every cloud screen starts by confirming you can actually reach the account.
What does aws sts get-caller-identity tell you, and when would you reach for it?
It returns the account id, user id, and ARN of whoever the current credentials belong to — the cloud equivalent of whoami. It's the first thing to run when a command is mysteriously denied or hitting the wrong account: it confirms which identity and account you're actually authenticated as.