AWS for Beginners: Learning To Use Big Computing For Small Projects

I recently started managing all my own hosting via Amazon Web Services. It may sound crazy - it's not that I run Netflix or a computer-consuming start-up in my spare time - but I've discovered that AWS learning is a rewarding, interesting and even useful one. Of course it is sometimes frightening and AWS is exaggerated by orders of magnitude, but in a few months I have discovered that I am building a new skill, control in a number of areas, and actually save money.

Trust me, nobody is more surprised than me. I always knew that AWS was a powerful tool and I knew it was somewhat accessible, because most of its products are not as technical or command-line as they were years ago, but it turns out that AWS is more accessible (and more affordable) than I had guessed.

If you've read my previous article about the best product management tools, you may have noticed a trend: I'm having trouble accepting second-rate tools. As far as professional products are concerned, if something better exists, I want it. The logic of all of this was clear a year ago when a team team from a Hewlett Packard team explained to me why so many companies wanted to buy their $ 8,000 workstations.

At that time, the costs seemed crazy to me. Do you not get 80% of the performance for 50% of the price? Why do companies not do what I asked? She explained it very clearly: engineers earn a lot of money and every minute they do not spend on engineering is a waste of money. So, if an abbreviated calculation time or abbreviated data calculation can mean the difference between a person who does more work or goes to a coffee while the work ends, most companies like to pay the cost of the increased treatment flow. The lesson for me was that powerful tools could mean an increase in costs in advance, but huge savings in the long term.

I have always seen tools as a way to develop a skill. To go back to this previous article, you can manage your project with a shared Google document or a simple tool like Basecamp, but if you use JIRA, you will learn the ins and outs of a power tool. a transferable tool. competence. This logic does not always work - sometimes speed must be a priority over learning - so it's best to take advantage when you can.

Combine this thought and my desire to launch a few websites, and the result was that I dusted off my AWS account instead of searching for the best cheap web hosting and signing up for GoDaddy or something similar.

Now I have a few months experience with what is essentially an AWS beginners course and I am making real progress. My first goal of hosting as many static sites as cheaply as possible was quickly achieved. Admittedly, I spent a week with what could be achieved in a few minutes, but already learned all that time. From that point on I wanted to give them SSL, manage URL routing with S3 bucket policy, create a subdomain and learn how to handle the CloudFront CDN. These are all things that I can do without outside help during my nights and weekends (except for one AWS premium support ticket).

Lately, my goal was to build a WordPress site on AWS. I am happy to say that I have done so. This is a blog about learning about cloud hosting and I hope that some people will avoid some of the headaches and pitfalls that I had to circumvent (almost all of them were not as confusing or difficult as they seemed at the time). I have a long list of To-Dos that is linked to the separate WordPress site: add SSL to the VPS subsystem, experiment with different levels of server performance and create e-mail accounts, to name a few. Sooner or later I will experiment with caching, digging in my logs, setting up multi-zone redundancy and basically continuing to play Ops until it becomes boring.

A good thing about technology is that it spreads in the course of time. Today's academic experience is the ultra-modern technology of tomorrow, the prosumer tool of tomorrow, and ultimately a standard feature of all products in the category ... to humor and ridicule (try to buy a laptop with a DVD player). That is exactly what we see with AWS, so for me it is everything