5 Hands-On Tutorials to Jump-Start AWS Free Tier

A couple of months ago, I finished an entire online video course for AWS Developers Associate certification and have read a few whitepapers since then as a personal commitment to learning Amazon's cloud computing platform. But if I am going to be serious about getting a certificate, I still need to do a lot of hands-on. I finally managed to get myself a free tier account and with all the information I have gotten so far, I am confused how and where to start.

I picked a random tutorial, hence my first one was the Breaking a Monolith Application into Microservices hands-on and felt that I am getting ahead of myself after finishing it. For someone who is completely new to AWS, here are 5 recommended hands-on tutorials so that one will have a better familiarity with the fundamentals.

1. Free AWS introductory hands-on labs from Qwiklabs. Qwiklabs provides self-paced labs using live AWS accounts and resources. I was initially hesitant in getting the Free tier account because of the payment method which you have to provide outright. While contemplating, I started with Qwiklab's free AWS guided hands-on labs just to get a feel of the AWS Management console. 
2. Once you do get your Free tier account, the first thing to do, aside from enabling your billing alerts, is to secure your root account. This tutorial will create an Admin group and users in IAM, and these created IAM accounts are the ones that you will be using for all of your hands-on activities moving forward.  One reason for doing this is so that we can avoid coupling our root accounts with unnecessary access keys. Also, refer to the recommended best practices when creating and managing your IAM accounts.   
3. Create an Amazon VPC for Use with a DB Instance for an Amazon VPC hands-on, but VPC in itself will require a lot of reading. I also recommend this AWS VPC Masterclass Webinar for a thorough understanding of Amazon VPC.
4. Build a Basic Web Application. Starting with a static web site that is hosted in S3, this is a quick peek on how to implement a REST API with Lambda and DynamoDB for a "serverless" approach. Serverless is an important concept in cloud computing and although it isn't the solution to everything, it's a way to optimize our use of the cloud. As organizations are porting some of its solutions to serverless approach, it is becoming a must-have knowledge among cloud computing learners.  
5. Deploying code to an EC2 instance. Ultimately, you would want to be able to run your actual application in AWS. The tutorial will use a sample application but you can tweak it so that you can deploy your own application if you already have one. This is a general approach using AWS CodeDeploy, but there are a lot of tutorials out there that is specific to the technology of your preference like this one for a Python web application, the idea is for you to have a working deployment and if you can utilize other AWS services (e.g. AWS RDS) all the better.