The scariest thing to me about AWS is that I might accidentally bankrupt myself while I learn to use it. I've seen horror stories on HN before. Articles titled "How I spent $32k with AWS, a for loop, and a simple typo" or something like that.<p>Normally when I learn something new, I learn by tinkering and breaking stuff. I don't feel comfortable doing that with AWS. I'm hoping people will tell me I'm way off base because this fear has stopped me from getting the ball rolling.
This article appears to include a lot of very good advice(speaking as an AWS solutions architect). I might suggest a emphasising a few things such as not having keys on login accounts(they negate multi-factor auth if leaked), and to ALWAYS pick or create a new IAM role if you aren't sure an existing one fits for the EC2 instances.. But perhaps this sort of advice is not appropriate for the article.<p>Much respect for the amount of work that went into this. I'll try to get through it all here at some point :)
Apologies in advance for the table of contents going way off the screen. This is the biggest post published so far. We'll be doing some UX work on the table of contents widget in the next week.
Out of curiousity, why go with AWS when Linode, Digitalocean, etc appear to be so much more cost effective? Is the simplicity of spinning up AWS instances really great enough to counterbalance what appears to be a significantly greater cost? Is it the flexibility of different AWS services?
These guides are really hard to read (at least for me) because there isnt really a point (until the end) where I can stop and go try out some of what I've learned. Perhaps, if it were formatted in the way of "steps to setup a scalable web app on AWS" it would be more palatable.
This links to a HN discussion on the relative merits of VPN access versus bastion/jump boxes (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637154" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637154</a>).<p>This conversation didn't ever seem to bottom out to conclusion? In particular I was wondering how servers connected _outwards_ in the VPN scenario.
Great to see article putting it all together. Also going to be great to send this to people who think that using AWS cloud means that you can skip hiring people with skills in systems administration.
This is a great article.<p>I knew I'd see a bunch of people stating that AWS is expensive and you should use a dedicated server or a VPS. But there are many applications built by people like me who are lone developers or small teams of developers who either don't have the admin skills or simply don't want to admin their own servers and the fact that AWS handles quite a lot of this for you is sometimes worth the the added cost.