AWS - A Wild Story

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This forum will contain AWS pieces parts as I work through them. Being somewhat new to AWS it can be a very confusing process. Not so much on the generic side because that part is easy, but when you start restricting and automating things it becomes much more complex. My take on AWS is basically taking everything you do in IT and placing it on Amazon. If however you have not been involved in all facets of IT it can become somewhat daunting. Since I have, it is probably a little clearer to me, but the way it is done is different, so I have to put together how all the pieces fit together. For a while now, when I would build an application I concentrated on building the application and did not worry about all the other stuff. For example, you built your application in a dev environment. For some testing you placed it in a UAT environment. Then it was pushed to production once you knew it was stable. The server team built the server you put it on, whether this be a VM or a physical machine. The database team built the database clustering and nodes to service your application. The server team also kept your server up to date with patches, etc. Some other team racked the hardware. The network team built the network path to the your server and application. The DNS team and load balancer team created an optimal path on the network to get to your application depending on where the audience was coming from. For AWS, replace anywhere above where I mentioned the "team" with "you" because you are now they. :) In case I forgot to mention, you will also pay for each piece of the puzzle. Depending on your situation, this can be good or bad. Of course this will be different in every organization. In your situation may allow you to simply concentrate on coding your application. All of these steps are replaced with automation. Your application is pushed, pulled, shared and manipulated in a repository. Scripts are created to build the server, create the network, load balancing and register all of this in DNS so that your audience can find it. If you are lucky enough to be able to do this via the AWS console it is fairly simple. This however is not optimal, because it is manual. This is where automation comes in. Each action will fire off the required steps required to complete this entire process when needed. Your server, database, network, load balancing are all created automatically. You will learn things like hydration, security groups, subnet groups, RDS, Aurora, etc. There are many new phrases along this path to learn and they are pretty much AWS specific. I will use this forum to post helpful insites as I step through (or in) AWS. I will attempt to mark things as I progress as either work in progress or actual working examples since I will be using this forum to test as well. Anything labled WIP should be considered Work In Progress.
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Now vs AWS