Day Five. Yes, I’m still doing the AWS courses… (see the project overview)
As of yesterday, I’m rushing through the courses. I’ve decided to use them as an overview because I think I’ll need to review each step I take on the path to a real build one step at a time. I’m sure I’m going to have to do this a few times in order to get good and comfortable with it. So, on to “AWS Developer: Deployment and Security” by Ryan Lewis.
Cloud Formation instead of Terraform??
One thing I may need to consider is his suggestion that we stick to Cloud Formation instead of Terraform unless we have a compelling reason to use Terraform. I’ll have to think about that. This is a good argument by Alexander Savchuk who prefers Terraform.
I breezed through “AWS Developer: Deployment and Security” It had a bunch of good info, but I’m sure I’ll need to dig into each of the topics covered in more detail. IAM seems pretty straight forward, but I’ll need to get into KMS keys in more detail.
I am going to move on to Terraform and see if I can’t get to a reasonable level there. That’s how I ultimately want to allocate all of the AWS resources. The Free Trial on my AWS account is expiring in 11 days. I will use it for Terraform testing, then get rid of it and start my real account (with another year of free trial, hopefully).
It would be nice to have an idea of how much stuff really costs and I won’t get that by using Free Trials, but while I’m learning, I’ll stick with the Free Trial.
Looking back…
Now that I know that I dumped the idea of using AWS completely for this project, all of this seems like a waste. But, there is a bunch of interchangeability between cloud providers, so no education seems completely a waste. Even though I chose Digital Ocean, in the end, for this VERY small project, AWS seems like the right choice for enterprise-level apps.
Next, Terraform. If there’s one thing I learned from these courses, it’s that I don’t want to do AWS set up and tear down manually!