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Jumping into the scary world of AWS

January 12, 20243 min read
Series

One of my goals for the new year is to gain hands-on experience with cloud technologies and the infrastructure side of software engineering. This includes stuff like logging, CI/CD pipelines, and automated deployments.

Currently, at my workplace, we heavily rely on AWS for managing our front-end deployments (and out backend too obviously) and sometimes during meetings, I get kind of lost when any infrastructure topic comes up. We use a lot of Terraform and Bash scripts, and right now, when I look at .tf or .sh files, it feels like I'm looking at hieroglyphics.

It's time to change that.

The Game plan

When I want to learn something new or gain a more comprehensive understanding of a topic, the first step I usually take is to make a list of everything I currently know about it. This list usually includes stuff that I may have come across randomly, but never had the chance to explore in depth.

I have used some AWS services before. The images on nartefacts (my side project) are stored in an S3 bucket. Also the whole create a colour palette functionality uses S3 buckets to store images and the colour palate files generated from those images. In a previous role, I had some interactions with lambda functions — I know some stuff but my knowledge is very surface level. If you ask me to for example set up an s3 bucket from scratch i couldn't do it.

Here is a dump of every AWS service I have heard of or interacted with in some way at work or on a side project:

  • AWS S3 - Storage Bucket
  • AWS Lambda - Serverless functions
  • AWS EC2 - Cloud compute (Servers, basically)
  • Dynamo DB - NoSQL database
  • AWS SNS - Used to send emails and notifications
  • RDS - PostgreSQL in the cloud
  • CloudFront - A Content Delivery Network (Really don’t know how they work - but i know that they cache static files in servers around the world close to your users)

After a quick search online on how to learn more about these services, i came across the Cloud Resume Challenge and it looked like a good starting point for me to get my hands dirty with AWS.

The Cloud Resume Challenge is a free online challenge to build a resume using HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and deploy it on the cloud using a technology like AWS. The challenge itself is free, but I purchased the accompanying ebook for around $23. I plan to use the ebook as a supplement to the free online guide.

My goal is to go through the challenge (including all the extensions & relevant mods), and document my journey and learnings in a series of interactive articles.

Hopefully, at the end of the challenge, I will have a better mental model about how AWS and its various core services work and i can look confidently at a .tf or .sh or a .yml config file and not feel like pulling my hair out.

In the next part of this series, I will be trying to open an new AWS account "the right way". As it turns out, opening an AWS account is not as straightforward as it sounds.

Till next time.