Introduction
Various technologies have revolutionized different aspects of our lives today, such as how we work, run our businesses, interact with each other, etc and one such technology is cloud computing. Cloud Computing is one of the most flourishing and in-demand technology. Businesses and organizations are transforming their operations to take advantage of this new technology.
So, let us begin with a quick overview of AWS.
What is AWS?
Cloud service is not a new term for us as we all are using smartphones nowadays. One such cloud service is AWS which stands for Amazon Web Services. AWS provides a web-based interface through which we can create resources and deploy our applications. It a is comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform developed by Amazon that offers more than 200 services from data centers spread across the globe. With the help of AWS, there is no need to maintain physical data centers and servers and data can be accessed from anywhere across the world. Several customers, including large organizations such as Adobe, Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, etc, and government agencies, rely on AWS to make their businesses more productive.
This cloud platform is a combination of Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and packaged Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.
What does it allow you to do?
In simple words AWS allows you to do the following things-
- AWS allows you to run web and application servers in the cloud to easily host dynamic websites.
- Aws securely stores all your files on its cloud server so you can access them from anywhere in the world.
- Information is stored in managed databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or SQL Server.
- AWS delivers static as well as dynamic files around the world using a CDN i.e Content Delivery Network.
- Aws allows you to send bulk emails to your customers quickly.
Now if you are looking for some good project ideas on AWS then in this article you will find projects on AWS of various sectors and skill levels along with their source code link so you can choose according to your interests.
AWS Project Ideas:
Best AWS Projects for Beginners:
1. Deploy a Windows Virtual Machine
Objective: To deploy Windows Virtual Machine without any security violations using a popular CMS, like Magento, WordPress, etc
If you want to become a cloud computing professional in AWS, start working on simple projects. And one of the simplest beginner-friendly projects to get started with AWS is deploying a Windows Virtual Machine(Windows Virtual machines are emulations of computer systems. A virtual machine, according to a more sophisticated definition, represents an abstraction of a physical device’s resources. If many virtual machines are present within a network then all of them work independently). You can deploy Windows VM in AWS, and for this purpose, you can use Amazon Lightsail as the web service which we have discussed earlier.
Virtual machines are useful in a wide range of fields. As a developer, virtual machines come in quite handy because they allow you to run multiple operating systems on a single machine and they are also useful for enhancing the efficiency of an operation
Getting familiar with VMs will help you in becoming a proficient engineer and is quite a necessary skill.
After you have created the VM, you can use Lightsail to connect with an RDP client.
2. Migrate a Git Repository on AWS
Objective: To migrate an existing Git repository using AWS CodeCommit.
In this project you will learn how to migrate an existing Git repository using AWS CodeCommit.AWS CodeCommit is a platform for hosting Git-based repositories. Depending on your needs, you can migrate either an existing Git repository or a locally stored unversioned project.
Before migrating a repository to CodeCommit, you must create and configure an IAM user for CodeCommit. And for managing CodeCommit AWS CLI should also be installed. AWS CLI offers flexibility when working with Git at the command line or terminal, even though most CodeCommit tasks can be performed without it.
There are many benefits of hosting your source code with CodeCommit such as its fully-managed experience, high availability, security.
3. Rapid Document Conversion
Objective: The goal is to quickly and accurately convert the document to the desired format as selected by the user.
Data is everywhere around us and therefore we feel the need to convert this data into many formats from time to time. If you are a student or a working professional you must have come across the need to convert a document to pdf or excel to a word document or any other format. That’s what AWS Lambda is for.AWS Lambda allows us to develop an application that can convert documents from one format to the other very easily and conveniently.
The CloudConvert API can be use to automatically convert all files, added to a specific S3 bucket.
Here is how the process works:
- User will upload their Office Document to the S3 bucket.
- Now, the Lambda function will be triggered by the S3 bucket with uploaded files details.
- Lambda function will convert documents with LibreOffice.
- Lambda function will upload PDF to S3 Bucket after conversion.
- After uploading you can also write additional code to update details in the Database.
4. Build a Website Using AWS Lightsail
Objective: To create a secure, reliable, usable, and readily available website using AWS.
You will need to use Amazon Lightsail, which is a virtual private server that can be used to create numerous websites.
Amazon Lightsail is a free AWS cloud service platform that provides you with the required resources to build an application. Completing this project will definitely make you familiar with this software
You will need to sign up for the AWS platform and then access Lightsail. You can create any type of website such as a website that displays the results of students in a University. The main reason for using AWS Lightsail is that It will enable you to utilize the optimum number of resources as per the need and also it comes with pre-configured leading CMSs such as WordPress, Magento, Redmine, etc. By using a CMS, it’s easier for us to deploy a website. Using a CMS will allow you to quickly get a new website up and running if you are a beginner or don’t want to write code from scratch.
When using AWS Lightsail as a virtual private server, you can use AWS EC2 or AWS Lambda. It comes pre-configured with several options for web development and provides SSD-based storage.
Intermediate AWS Projects with Source Code
5. Create an Online Store
Objective: Creating an e-commerce-like platform that can handle all the tasks such as requests, payments, etc by itself
AWS offers a highly secured and low-cost solution e-commerce platform to all small and large business organizations. For building e-commerce like platform, we need to use the AWS Marketplace service. AWS Marketplace enables organizations to discover, procure, entitle, provide, and govern third-party software easily.
To find free, open-source, and fully customizable e-commerce stores in AWS Marketplace one must search e-commerce in the search menu.AWS also provides auto-scaling services which help the e-commerce website grow and shrink on-demand. To deliver the website to the customers without any delay Amazon CloudFront is used through which all the requests are routed to the nearest edge locations.
6. Build a Simple Android App
Objective: To create a simple Android application using Amazon AWS Amplify.
Suppose that you want to build native Android app to display a list of student results . You want to set up APIs to allow listing, creating, and storing student data and you also want user authentication but you don’t want to manage the backend then AWS amplify will cater to all your needs.
The Amplify Android library is AWS’ preferred mechanism for interacting with AWS services from an Android device. As it provides a high-level interface to perform different categories of cloud operations.
To get started with the project, you will need to download Java JDK as well as Android Studio into your system.
In this project, you will learn:
- How to add a GraphQL API that’s backed by AWS AppSync.
- How to manage a serverless cloud backend using the command line interface Amplify.
- How to enable user authentication through Amazon Cognito.
- How to enable querying and displaying the list of student results in a RecyclerView.
- How to enable adding new student data and persisting data in the backend.
This project will help you gain a deeper understanding of the AWS services required to build and launch Android apps.
7. Create Attendance Automation
Objective: We will be creating a website for attendance automation using services such as AWS cognito, lightsail, amazon rekognition, etc.
For authentication purpose, we will use AWS cognito so that students can log in on the website using their roll numbers.
Further, Amazon virtual cloud server (LightSail) will be used which provides a free static IP address to host the website. Select an OS from the list of options and build the website using the MEAN stack.Following successful login, the user will have the option to open the device camera and scan their identity card on the dashboard.
The Amazon Rekognition service which can store information about detected faces in server-side containers known as collections will be used to read and scan the image of students on the identity card. With this service, images are analyzed using a deep learning algorithm and are highly scalable. But first we have to manually add faces of students in that collection in one of the AWS regions in our account.
As soon as the card is scanned, the details of students are saved in DynamoDB.
8. Create and Deploy a React Web Application
Objective(s): To build a full-stack React web application.
ReactJS is one of the most popular javascript libraries trending nowadays for building UI of the web as well as a mobile application. React can be used to create single-page applications very easily.
By building this project you can get a good experience of full-stack development as well as AWS cloud computing professional.
For building full-stack application AWS amplify is used that allows us to build, deploy, and host serverless web applications.
There will be several steps that you have to follow to complete this project. Firstly host the React app on AWS Amplify. Secondly, use Amazon Cognito for authentication. After building the frontend using react you have to create APIs to send data to the frontend. GraphQL can be used to develop a RESTful API for your application.
Advanced AWS Projects
9. Create a Traffic Monitoring Tool
Objective: Creating a Framework for Smart Traffic Control using AWS IOT
Amazon Web Services offers the most comprehensive portfolio for building scalable, extensible, and NoOps systems. Another benefit of AWS is that it enables the architecture to bridge the gap between real and simulated paradigms by interacting with virtual as well as physical devices. AWS IoT is a platform that allows us to securely connect devices to relay information to and from the AWS platform using Message Queue Telemetry Transport(MQTT). therefore through IoT Core service, cameras can be connected to applications without requiring server management.
A connection protocol will be chosen among the available options. It supports
- MQTT (Message Queuing and Telemetry Transport),
- HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol – Secure),
- MQTT over WSS (WebSockets Secure), and
- LoRaWAN (Low-power Long-range Wide-area Network).
Another service by Amazon namely the Amazon Kinesis service will be used to collect and analyze all the real-time traffic videos. As data is received, this service responds instantly, instead of waiting for full data to arrive.
10. Create a Chatbot With Amazon Lex
Objective: The project’s objective is to create a chatbot that provides instant replies to the messages sent by the users
A chatbot is an application that conducts a conversation automatically without the presence of a person on one end. They allow companies to enhance customer experience and reduce costs of hiring a person to communicate with users. There are many types of chatbots available right now, and they all are developed for different purposes.
Chatbots are implemented with the help of AI i.e Artificial Intelligence. During the process of building a chatbot, you will be able to apply artificial intelligence concepts in real-world situations.
Amazon, Flipkart and many other e-commerce apps have chatbots installed to reply to users’ queries instantly.Another good example is telegram which you all must be aware about. You can use Amazon Lex which is an AWS service which helps in development of voice and text-based conversational interfaces such as chatbots… You can also use Lex to experience one-click deployment and then add your developed application to the desired platform. For the chatbots created using Lex platform independence is also essential.
You will need to build a chatbot for this project that will generate automated responses to users’ questions.
To ensure that your chatbot works correctly, test it by starting conversations with it from the users’ perspective. As you configure the chatbot, make sure that the conversations relate to the intent that you chose.
11. Orchestrate Redshift ETL using AWS Glue and Step Functions
Objective: In this project, you will learn how to build an ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) Big Data pipeline with the help of AWS’s in-house featured applications for drawing relevant business insights from the available data.
Amazon Redshift is fully managed petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse service. Using Redshift Spectrum, you can directly query structured and unstructured data in Amazon S3 without deploying them into the Redshift cluster. In Redshift, we can run complex, analytic queries against structured data and semi-structured data, while using sophisticated query optimization, columnar storage on high-performance storage like SSD, and massively parallel query execution. It is an OLAP solution that can store petabytes of data without owning any infrastructure (PaaS).
Data Description – The Amazon eCommerce website hosts a wide range of products from a large number of sellers and thus has a vast database of customer reviews. Now this dataset can be used for machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning, and other applications. In this project, you will work with the Amazon Customer Reviews dataset that contains product reviews written by Amazon customers. There are more than 200K reviews from customers in five different countries. The dataset can be downloaded in two formats: TAV (Tab-separated values)/ Parquet (an optimized columnar binary format).
12. Alexa, Who’s At The Door?
Objective: An Amazon Alexa and Raspberry Pi project that used AWS lambda to allow users to know who exactly is knocking at their door using facial recognition.
Alexa, Who’s At The Door? Is an Amazon Alexa skill set that uses the Raspberry Pi and Firebase, as well as a facial recognition API, to let users know who is at their door. Alexa sends a command to the Raspberry Pi to take a picture of visitor’s face using the camera module. Kairos, a facial recognition algorithm, is then used to identify whether the face is recognized, unknown, or not present at all.
For “Who’s at the Door?”, as a connection between local and cloud communication, Firebase is used. Both the lambda function as well as the Raspberry Pi are listening to the firebase DB (the lambda function gets triggered by Alexa Voice Services and then it listens to firebase).
AWS Projects: Why Are They So Important?
According to a survey by Accenture in 2018, developers consider Amazon Web Services the most future-looking platform. Participants in the survey also rated AWS as a highly developer-friendly platform.
Here are some of the main characteristics of AWS that will justify why are they considered important:
- The AWS Auto Scaling feature allows developers to automatically adjust resources as demand changes.
- The pay-as-you-go model makes it extremely budget-friendly and payment is on par with services availed
- Services are provided immediately on demand and there is no visible delay when more servers are deployed
- Certain AWS resources can be accessed for free with the AWS Free Tier account.
- AWS employs advanced security measures to ensure that user data remains protected.
Conclusion
So in this article, we discussed about various projects which can be built using AWS. Cloud computing is in great demand today. If you are interested in working with any of the cloud technologies, keep in mind that there will be problems in implementation, but things will become clearer as you practice more and more. For practice, you will get a lot of projects available on Github to try on too, and also AWS has a very good set of documentation. Apart from this, online communities have a bunch of experienced professionals to help.
FAQs
Q.1) How do I learn AWS from scratch?
A: AWS (Amazon Web Services) is overwhelming and If you are new to AWS you’ll know the feeling of being lost and not knowing where to start so start by taking small steps at a time and begin with simpler things first, then move on the advanced topics.
There are three things you should focus on when learning AWS:
- Learn core AWS services first
- Prioritize hands-on learning
- Structure your learning
For hands-on learning here are some steps you can follow:
- First, you have to create an AWS account
- Then enroll in any online course that you find relevant according to your needs.
- Explore the guides or blogs provided by AWS which contains CF templates as well.
- Try building a small application, that also you can get from AWS blogs.
- Finally, Experiment
In this way, you can have a good command on AWS.
Q.2) Is AWS easy?
A: Learning AWS can be quick and easy and can take as little as a few days up to a few months depending on your past experience. If you’ve already worked with similar technologies for example systems administration or with other hosting and cloud services then you might find AWS easier to learn. To learn AWS, however, no previous experience, special knowledge, or coding experience is necessary.
So, if you work hard, get hands-on experience, and Network with other people you will learn AWS easily.
Q.3) Is AWS free to use?
A: The short answer is, no Amazon Web Services isn’t free to use. However, AWS has a free offering for 12 months. Also, there are a number of services that are always free. You can test out various products before making a big commitment using the free trial versions of many of their services. Customers can use the free 12-months products (up to a specific level of usage) for one year from the date the account was created if they are new trial customers. When your free tier expires or if your application use exceeds the free tier limits then you will start paying standard, pay-as-you-go service rates.
Q.4) How long does it take to learn AWS?
A: You can learn the basics of AWS in just a few weeks but if you want to be professional in AWS then there are four levels depending on various levels of learning or expertise:
-In order to become an AWS Cloud practitioner, it takes around one month to learn the basics of cloud computing, setting up an AWS account, using the AWS management console, and working with S3 services.
-For an AWS Architect, it takes around 1.5 months to learn Identity Access Management, EC2, Database on AWS, Route53, Network Address Translation, HA Architecture, etc.
-For an AWS Developer, it takes around 2-3 months to learn AWS SDK, Access Management, Integrate AWS applications by using AWS Lambda, AWS API Gateway, Amazon SNS, etc.
-For an AWS Operations level, it takes around 3-4 months to learn basic concepts like managing AWS instances and permissions, securing AWS, troubleshooting problems, and configuring ECS.
