Top 8 Exciting AWS Projects & Ideas For Beginners [2020]

AWS Projects & Topics

Looking for AWS project ideas? Then you’ve come to the right place because, in this article, we’ve shared multiple AWS projects. The projects are of various sectors and skill-levels so you can choose according to your expertise and interests. The more projects you have in your portfolio, the better. Companies are always on the lookout for skilled AWS Developers who can develop innovative AWS projects. So, if you are a beginner, the best thing you can do is work on some top AWS projects.

We, here at upGrad, believe in a practical approach as theoretical knowledge alone won’t be of help in a real-time work environment. In this article, we will be exploring some interesting AWS projects which beginners can work on to put their knowledge to test. In this article, you will find top AWS projects for beginners to get hands-on experience on Java.

Amid the cut-throat competition, aspiring AWS Developers must have hands-on experience with real-world AWS projects. In fact, this is one of the primary recruitment criteria for most employers today. As you start working on AWS projects, you will not only be able to test your strengths and weaknesses, but you will also gain exposure that can be immensely helpful to boost your career.

What is AWS? 

AWS stands for Amazon Web Service, which is among the most popular cloud platforms. AWS provides developers and organizations with cloud services and helps them stay agile. From multi-million startups to government agencies, many organizations are using AWS. If you want to become a cloud-computing professional, you should learn about AWS. AWS provides a variety of services to its clients.

Whether you’re a BI expert or a web developer, being familiar with AWS will enhance your resume nonetheless. It is the leading cloud platform in the world, and the demand for its experts is evergreen. 

Why You Should Work on AWS Projects

The best way to showcase your knowledge of a particular skill or topic is through projects. Projects can help the other person see that you have used the required technology in the past. When you work on projects, you get to discover your weak areas too. Working on AWS projects will help you in strengthening your resume (or portfolio).

Let’s start looking for AWS projects to build your very own AWS projects!

So, here are a few AWS Projects which beginners can work on:

Top AWS Projects

This list of AWS projects for students is suited for beginners, intermediates & experts. These AWS projects will get you going with all the practicalities you need to succeed in your career.

Further, if you’re looking for AWS projects for final year, this list should get you going. So, without further ado, let’s jump straight into some AWS projects that will strengthen your base and allow you to climb up the ladder.

Here are some AWS project ideas that should help you take a step forward in the right direction.

1. Deploy a Windows Virtual Machine

One of the best ideas to start experimenting you hands-on AWS projects for students is working on deploying a windows virtual machine. Virtual machines are emulations of computer systems. The more sophisticated definition says that a virtual machine is a product abstracted resources of a physical device. They are isolated environments within the system, which means they operate independently of other virtual machines present within the same network. 

Virtual machines find applications in many areas. They are useful in enhancing the efficiency of an operation. You can deploy a Windows virtual machine through AWS and learn how one works. Getting familiar with VMs will help you in becoming a proficient engineer and is quite a necessary skill. 

To deploy a Windows VM in AWS, you can use Amazon Lightsail, simplifying this task considerably. Amazon Lightsail is a cloud platform that provides you with the required resources to build a website or application. Its UI is straightforward to learn, and completing this project will make you familiar with this software. 

After you have created the VM, you can use Lightsail to connect with an RDP client. 

2. Create a Website on AWS

One of the best ideas to start experimenting you hands-on AWS projects for students is creating a website. This is among the most straightforward AWS project ideas on this list. Here, you have to create a website by using the AWS cloud platform. You can use Amazon Lightsail in this project to simplify things. Lightsail offers SSD-based storage, and its interface is easy to learn. As a beginner, you wouldn’t have any difficulty in using this solution to build your website. 

We recommend Amazon Lightsail in this project because it comes pre-configured with many popular web development solutions such as Joomla and WordPress.

We recommend you build a WordPress website because it’s the most popular CMS out there. You should start by creating a blog. On the other hand, if you have worked with websites before, you can build an eCommerce site or a portfolio site. 

Must Read: Cloud Computing Project Ideas

3. Launch a Serverless Web App

It might be one of the advanced AWS projects in this list; however, once you’ve completed it, you’d be familiar with many concepts of AWS and its services. Here are the technologies we’ll use in this project along with their purpose:

• AWS Amplify – For front-end of the web app and hosting the HTML, CSS, and JS
• Amazon Cognito – For Use management and authentication for the backend API
• Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda – For building and using the backed API
• Amazon DynamoDB – For adding a persistence layer for storage

To complete this project, you should be familiar with all of these technologies, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You will also have to implement RESTful APIs in this project, so you should know about their implementations. However, once you’re done, you would know how various Amazon services work together. We recommend building a simple web app first and then making a more complex one. For starters, you can create a BMI calculator or a simple reminder app. Mentioning AWS projects can help your resume look much more interesting than others.

4. Set up Kubernetes Clusters on Amazon EC2 Spot

This is one of the interesting AWS projects to create. Kubernetes is an open-source solution you can use to automate deployment, management, and scaling of containers. This software enables you to create, manage, and orchestrate containers in cloud computing. It’s among the most significant AWS projects in this list because Kubernetes is a vital skill for cloud-computing professionals. Because Kubernetes is open-source, it’s widely popular in the industry too. This is an excellent AWS projects for beginners.

As you’re working on AWS, you’d have to use Amazon EC2, a service for getting dynamic computing capabilities on the cloud. But we’ll take it a step further and use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which allow users to capitalize on most of the capacities of EC2. EC2 Spot Instances and Kubernetes have the same approach towards containers, so you can easily use both of them. Make sure that you adhere to Spot Instances’ best practices while working on this project. You can build multiple node groups and focus on capacity optimization for allocation to ensure the worker nodes function correctly. 

5. Build a Content Recommendation System 

Recommendation systems are among the most popular AI and ML implementations. From Netflix to Flipkart, every major company uses them to enhance user experience and engagement. You can build a recommendation system on the AWS cloud by applying nearest neighbour algorithms. 

In this project, you’d use Amazon SageMaker, an excellent tool for machine learning implementations. It has built-in algorithms that don’t require label data, and it uses semantic search instead of string matching, so using SageMaker will simplify the task considerably. Use the K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm in this project so your recommendation system would provide accurate and practical suggestions to the user. 

6. Use Rekognition and Identify Famous People

Computer vision is among the most popular concepts of machine learning and AI. If you’re interested in working on a computer vision project, you should start with this one. You should be familiar with the basics of computer vision and its related algorithms before you begin working on this project. 

In this project, you have to create a face recognition model that can identify specific people in a picture. Usually, training face recognition takes some time and effort, but because we’re using AWS, things are more comfortable. It is one of the trending AWS projects. You will use Amazon Rekognition in this project to perform face recognition because it allows users to add and analyze images quickly by using deep learning. This software offers identification of many sorts of objects, activities, people, and text in videos and pictures. This is one of the trending AWS projects. Building and training a facial recognition model will become substantially comfortable with Rekognition. 

In the beginning, you can train your model in identifying a particular famous person, such as MS Dhoni or Robert Dowrey Jr. When you’ve prepared the model, you can test it out and see how well it performs. To make things more complicated, you can train your model to identify multiple people by adding more famous people.  

Also Read: Machine Learning Project Ideas

7. Use Lex to Create Chatbots

Chatbots are among the most popular uses of artificial intelligence. They allow companies to enhance customer experience and reduce costs. There are many types of chatbots present, and they all perform different tasks. A chatbot is an application that conducts a conversation with someone else in the place of a person. 

Businesses use chatbots to provide quick answers to questions and sometimes to resolve complaints. Around 58% of B2B companies and 42% of B2C companies use chatbots on their sits (source). 

You will use Amazon Lex to build a chatbot in this project. Amazon Lex is a service that simplifies chatbot building for developers. It offers one-click deployment, so when you’ve created the bot, you can add it to multiple platforms. It eases the process of building a chatbot that speaks naturally as you’ll only have to add a few phrases and samples to train the model. 

Moreover, you can easily integrate Amazon Lex with other AWS services (such as AWS Lambda). 

8. Train a Machine Learning Model with SageMaker

The demand for machine learning professionals is soaring, and if you want to enter this sector, you’d have to work on some ML projects too. Amazingly, AWS offers machine learning solutions in its services, and also among which, the most popular is Amazon SageMaker. In this project, you can train a machine learning model by using SageMaker. 

Amazon SageMaker provides you with a unique, integrated development environment for machine learning. The IDE allows you to create notebooks, switch between steps, check the results, and do much more. SageMaker notebooks will enable you to get the compute instances quickly and efficiently. You can also use the Autopilot feature of SageMaker to complete the process with much less effort. 

To work on this project, you should be familiar with machine learning concepts and algorithms. We recommend starting with a simple model if you haven’t worked on an ML project before. You should first begin with a simple question-answering bot with a set of questions present in its options. Then you can work your way up to build a more sophisticated and conversational chatbot. 

Learn More About AWS

These are a few AWS projects that you could try out!

Now go ahead and put to test all the knowledge that you’ve gathered through our data engineering projects guide to build your very own AWS projects!

Working on AWS projects will help you understand its various services and their uses. We hope you found this list of project ideas useful. If you have any questions or suggestions on this article, please let us know in the comments. 

On the other hand, if you want to learn more about AWS and its related subjects, check out our Software development specialization in cloud computing. It would help you understand all the core and advanced concepts as you’ll get direct guidance from industry experts. 

Which AWS project are you going to work on? Which one do you think is the most straightforward project in this list? Share your thoughts.