This repository is a practical learning path to develop your AWS skills. We will build, tear down, and rebuild a URL Shortener multiple times, evolving the architecture and deployment methodology in each iteration.
The goal is to gain experience with a variety of AWS services, infrastructure patterns, and the trade-offs between different cloud strategies.
We purposefully build the same URL Shortener application in each stage to ensure we focus our attention of the AWS specific elements, minimising the overhead of a variety of web applications to learn about.
Focus: Application and Service Fundamentals.
- Architecture: Serverless (S3, CloudFront, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB).
- Method: Manual configuration via the AWS Management Console.
- Goal: Understand how services connect and function without the abstraction of code.
📂 2-CDK
Focus: Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
- Architecture: Serverless (Identical to Iteration 1).
- Method: AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) in Python.
- Goal: Learn to version, deploy, and manage infrastructure using software engineering principles.
Focus: Orchestration & Compute abstraction.
- Architecture: Moving logic from Lambda to Fargate/ECS.
- Method: Dockerization and Load Balancing.
Focus: Redundancy, Load Balancing and VPC management
- Architecture: EC2 Auto-scaling groups, VPCs and Load Balancers.
- Architecture over Syntax: We focus on why a service is chosen and how it talks to others.
- Repeatability: By the end of the CDK phase, you should be able to deploy a full stack in minutes.
- Cost Awareness: Every exercise is designed to stay within the AWS Free Tier where possible.
Before starting any iteration, ensure you have an active AWS Account. Follow the instructions within the specific iteration folders to set up your local environment.