Do this:
1. Open AWS and create an account.
2. Go to EC2, spin up an instance, generate a key pair, and SSH into it from your local system. Just play around install Nginx, deploy a Node app, break things, fix them.
3. Decide to launch something? Go to Security Groups open ports for HTTP (80), HTTPS (443), and SSH (22).
4. Grab your instance’s public IP, open it in your browser, and you’ll see your app running on the cloud.
5. Start scaling ? create another EC2 instance and set up an Application Load Balancer to route traffic.
6. Tired of adding instances manually? Use Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) define min/max instances, attach a launch template/AMI of your app, and AWS will scale automatically based on CPU or request load.
7. Getting millions of requests and your DB is choking? Use Kafka or SQS for buffering high-throughput workloads. Learn more about async
8. Store images, videos, or backups? Use S3 connect it from your app via the SDK, and make a file uploader.
9. Use RDS for managed databases (MySQL/Postgres). AWS handles backups, scaling, and maintenance.
10 Use CloudWatch to monitor your instances, logs, and metrics. Set up alerts when CPU spikes or memory usage is high.
11. For networking, explore VPCs subnets, route tables, gateways. This is where you learn how AWS isolates traffic securely. You will learn really well about networking here. Just create a vpc and play around
12. Once you’re comfortable, try Terraform to automate infra because that's 100X easier to manage state.
Stage 13: Say Fuck AWS for stealing money and buy your own VPS, set up Docker, or use Coolify for one-click PaaS setups.
Don’t overthink it.
• Learn EC2 → compute
• Learn S3 → storage
• Learn RDS → database
• Learn IAM → security
• Learn VPC → networking
• Learn Lambda → automation
• Learn CloudWatch → monitoring
• Learn Route 53 → DNS & domains
You don’t need every AWS service.
Just master the ones that actually run the cloud. ☁️