Blog
Thoughts on engineering, design, and building great products.
Infrastructure as Code, What Terraform Is, and Getting to Know the CLI
The series opener: why managing infrastructure by hand eventually breaks, what Infrastructure as Code solves, and where Terraform fits in that picture. We dissect the core and provider architecture, install Terraform 1.15, and tour the main CLI commands.
Full Teardown and Wrap-up
The final article. The EC2 cluster has done its job, and leaving it running burns money every hour. This article tears down all the infrastructure in order — terminate the six instances (taking their disks with them), release the Elastic IP, remove the IAM role — with a real cost table for three choices: keep running, stop to save it, or delete entirely. Then a look back: from a single self-signed certificate to a fully operational HA Kubernetes cluster, built by hand.
Stand Up Six EC2 Machines and Prepare the OS
The first hands-on article: stand up a dedicated VPC on AWS with six EC2 machines (1 load balancer, 3 controllers, 2 workers), assign fixed private IPs, then prepare the OS — hostname, /etc/hosts, kernel modules, sysctl, disable swap — and install the kubectl and cfssl tooling. All done step by step, run for real.
What DevOps Is and Why You Should Learn It Alongside AWS
Series opener: what problem DevOps solves, what work it covers, why we learn it together with AWS, and the hands-on roadmap ahead.
Open an AWS Account Safely and Set Up a Billing Alert
Create an AWS account the right way: enable MFA on the root account, create an IAM user for daily use, install the AWS CLI, and set a Budget so no bill catches you off guard.
EC2: Create Your First Virtual Server and Run a Web Server
Create an EC2 instance, SSH into it, install nginx, and open the web page in a browser. The first article with a billable resource, so also the first with a cleanup section.
VPC and Security Group: Networking and Basic Firewalling on AWS
Understand VPC, public/private subnets, route tables, and Security Groups. Know why your server lets some in and not others, and how to tighten access correctly.