Day Three – AWS step-by-step (see project overview here)
Today started with IAM (still working on the AWS Developer: Getting Started by Ryan Lewis). We’re setting up a vanilla and free EC2 instance. It’s step by step and I’m following along like a Zombie, pausing the instruction and performing the steps. It’s slow going during this part. When I’m working on something like this I can easily get sidetracked. Squirrel! Actually, I have 2-month-old kittens at my house, so it’s really, Kittens!
Everything in the course matched the AWS console more-or-less perfectly until it came time to create the Auto-scaling Group. In this section, AWS does not match what the course was teaching at all. This is always a danger with following step-by-step instructions.
Ended up, I skipped the step to create an AMI from the running instance. I’m pretty sure this will all be negated by Terraform, but I’m going to complete all of the courses in the AWS learning path before I start that. My ultimate goal is to set up and tear down AWS resources using Terraform as Donnie did at ContractSafe, but, for now, I’m just learning AWS, so I’m just doing as I’m told.
The next module is covering s3. Since I’ve worked with s3 quite a bit, I am going to try to speed things up by not following along. My plan is to use Python and this demo is in NodeJS. I know NodeJS is a good language option, but, since my language of choice is Python, I’ll skip most of this s3 coding knowing that the Python version will be different (Boto3 rather than the NodeJs sdk).
On to databases. I think I’m going to skip through this part, too. The first couple apps I’m planning will not be data intensive. And, when I decide I need a database, I feel like I’ll need to get deeper into the details than this course is going. The course is doing a good job of telling me step-by-step what I need to do, but, step-by-step is something I’d rather read than watch. As I’m watching, I’m thinking I made a good decision. He’s creating a database using a gui db interface (Postico). Not my favorite activity.
Looking back…
I’m publishing the info on each day after I know what I ended up doing. In the end, I decided that I don’t need a load balancer and two web servers for the little thing I’m doing that will likely have no traffic. Also, my AWS for free period expired at the end of August, 2020. I’ve used AWS enough in the past to be able to get around.
And…
During the Googling I did while going through tutorials, writing code, etc. I came across many mentions of the $100 free Digital Ocean deal. Since I had the AWS cost fear and want experience with additional cloud platforms, and I like free stuff, I used Digital Ocean for hosting in the end. I set up one server and one database, so it’s bare bones.
On to Day four…