One Month with Amazon Web Services

I have been working off and on in my spare time this past month with Amazon Web Services – AWS. I am not able to work on it full-time but just in bits and pieces. I watched a few training videos to start with, but soon I was deep into moving one of my web sites to AWS.

So what have I learned during my time deep into workings of AWS?

Amazon Web Services is AWESOME!

I am amazed at how Amazon has created the ability for people like me to create my own network, firewalls, private clouds, gateways, VPN’s, servers, storage clusters – basically all kinds of really cool resources – all from a web browser. This is what we call a “software-defined network”. It is really the first time I have experienced this technology and it is completely awesome. Rather than having to go about and buy a firewall, install it, set up VPN tunnels and firewall rules, set up VLAN’s and IP subnets and DNS servers – I can do it all right from the Amazon web interface. And if I wanted I could even do it from a command line or programmatically using a JSON file. Which leads me to my next realization.

I still hate command lines.

I seriously hate doing command line work. One reason I never was a huge fan of Cisco was because of all the command line work that was required. I hate trying to remember all the different commands for Cisco, Sonicwall, Amazon, PHP, Unix/Linux, Docker, blah blah ad naseum. It just blows me away that programmers who write all this stuff think that normal human beings like command lines. Luckily Amazon provides a nice GUI for most of their services. They also offer a command line interface for people who like to type and remember all that stuff. Not for me.

Amazon Lightsail is great for beginners

My first web server I brought up on Amazon Lightsail. Piece of cake. If you want a simple WordPress site, then Lightsail might be must the ticket. It is easier and much, much faster than Bluehost or GoDaddy and even less expensive. Worked great, but the more I learned about AWS the more I realized that Lightsail was a bit simplified in comparison to what I was looking for. It would probably work fine for most of my web site work, but I really wanted to learn more about scalability and elasticity of AWS and Lightsail is learning to ride a tricycle and then hoping to race mountain bikes. It is just too limiting for what I want to do and just as importantly, learn.

Docker is totally cool but probably overkill for me right now

My son, who works in IT for a large Oklahoma corporation, is really excited about DOCKER. I dug deep into that technology and it is really, really cool too, and very scalable and great for software developers, but the more I dug into it the more I realized it was adding one more layer of complexity to all the stuff I was learning about AWS. And learning AWS is a HUGE task. HUGE. I finally decided to put Docker on hold for a few months so that I could concentrate on AWS and once I get it figured out, start adding Docker back into the mix.