AWS Tutorial for Beginners – Step-by-Step Guide to Cloud Computing
The short version: Kevin Stratvert's friendly AWS how-to never mentions that every EC2 instance and S3 bucket lives in a real building drawing real power and water somewhere in America.
Our Take
Kevin Stratvert's tutorial is a genuinely useful, well-made walkthrough for anyone spinning up their first EC2 instance or S3 bucket — that's not our fight. But it's a good reminder of how thoroughly the industry has trained us to think of "the cloud" as an abstraction: click a button, launch a server, pay a few cents an hour, done. Nowhere in a 'getting started' video is there a slide showing the substation upgrade, the water-cooled chiller loop, or the county tax abatement that made your "virtual server" possible.
That's the gap GridWatch exists to fill. Every one of the services this video walks through — EC2, RDS, S3 — resolves to a physical building somewhere, usually in Virginia, Ohio, or a handful of other states that have quietly become the backbone of American cloud computing. Those buildings sign multi-decade power contracts, negotiate water rights with local utilities, and often get property tax breaks that shift the burden onto everyone else's bill. None of that shows up in a console tutorial, and it's not supposed to — but it's the part of the AWS story that actually affects your town.
If this video makes you curious about where AWS (or Azure, or Google Cloud) actually runs the hardware behind your new S3 bucket, check our facility map to see what's been built or proposed near you, and our take-action page if you want to weigh in before the next deal gets signed.
This is GridWatch the USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Kevin Stratvert, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.