Navigating the AWS Console
Your control panel for all 200+ AWS services, oriented in four parts.
Once you're logged in, you land on the AWS Management Console. It looks overwhelming at first. It isn't, once you know where to look.
Top-left dropdown. Organizes every service into categories: Compute, Storage, Database, Networking, and more.
The fastest way to find anything. Just type the name: "EC2", "S3", "IAM".
Top-right corner. Resources are region-specific: what you create in us-east-1 doesn't exist in ap-south-1.
Billing dashboards, budgets, and account settings all live here.
The search bar is how you'll actually navigate day to day. Nobody memorizes the services menu, you type what you're looking for.
Four things to orient on: the services menu for browsing, the search bar for finding, the region selector because resources don't cross regions, and billing for keeping an eye on spend.