Build AWS Infrastructure
The Right Way

A real production case study: how I diagnosed slow PHP-FPM workers, found missing MySQL indexes causing full table scans, tuned pool settings with a calculated formula, offloaded sessions to Redis (97% cache hit rate), and moved static assets to CloudFront — cutting AWS costs by ~80% and reducing EC2 instances from 6 to 2.

S3 for objects, EBS for block storage, EFS for shared files — but knowing which to pick for each use case saves you money and headaches. This guide covers pricing, performance, real use cases, and a decision flowchart to help you choose the right storage every time.

From "what is Docker" to multi-stage production builds. This guide covers images, containers, Dockerfiles, layer caching, Docker Compose for multi-service apps, .dockerignore, and pushing to ECR. Everything you need to go from zero to deploying containers.

You run terraform plan and get "Error acquiring the state lock." Do not panic. Do not immediately force-unlock. This guide explains why it happens, how to safely fix it, and how to prevent it from happening again — without corrupting your state file.

Most AWS accounts have the same problems — root with no MFA, developers with AdministratorAccess, access keys that have not been rotated in years. This guide covers practical IAM patterns that work in production: scoped policies, tag-based access control, MFA enforcement for destructive actions, and using Access Analyzer to find unused permissions.

An honest comparison from someone who has used both. Terraform wins on ecosystem, multi-cloud, syntax, and modules. CloudFormation wins on automatic rollback and zero state management. This guide covers the real trade-offs with side-by-side code examples so you can pick the right tool for your team.

By default Terraform stores state locally. The moment a second person joins your project, local state becomes a problem — no locking, no versioning, no collaboration. This guide sets up S3 for encrypted state storage and DynamoDB for locking so two people never corrupt the state by running apply at the same time.

Spinning up an RDS instance through the AWS console takes five minutes. Setting it up properly for production takes a lot more thought. This guide covers what actually matters — placing your database in private subnets where it cannot be reached from the internet, enabling encryption at rest and in transit, configuring automated backups with the right retention, switching to gp3 storage to save money, and turning on Performance Insights so you can spot slow queries before your users do.

Storing AWS access keys in GitHub secrets is a security risk that most teams accept because they do not know a better way. There is one — OIDC lets GitHub Actions assume an IAM role directly without any long-lived credentials. This guide sets up the full pipeline: ECR repository with image scanning, OIDC trust between GitHub and AWS, and deployment workflows you can copy straight into your repo for ECS or EKS.

You have dockerized your app and now you need somewhere to run it. ECS Fargate lets you run containers without managing any servers — no EC2 instances to patch, no cluster capacity to worry about. This guide takes you through the full setup: task definitions, services, load balancer integration, auto-scaling based on CPU and memory, and pulling secrets from AWS Secrets Manager so nothing sensitive ends up in your code.

You have built a React app, a portfolio, or a landing page and you want to put it on your own domain with proper SSL. This guide covers the full setup — S3 bucket for storage, CloudFront as your CDN for fast global delivery, Route 53 for DNS, ACM for a free SSL certificate, and proper routing so your single-page app does not break when someone refreshes on a deep link.

Your dev and staging EC2 instances and RDS databases are running 24/7 but your team only works 8 hours a day. That means you are paying for 16 hours of idle time every single day. This guide shows you how to automatically stop everything at night and start it back up in the morning using Lambda and EventBridge — saving up to 65% on non-production AWS costs without anyone lifting a finger.

Most tutorials show you a single subnet and call it done. That falls apart the moment you need a database that should not be reachable from the internet. This guide walks you through building a proper three-tier VPC — public subnets for load balancers, private subnets for your application, and isolated database subnets — spread across multiple availability zones so one AZ going down does not take your entire stack with it.

Your dev and staging EC2 instances and RDS databases are running 24/7 but your team only works 8 hours a day. That means you are paying for 16 hours of idle time every single day. This guide shows you how to automatically stop everything at night and start it back up in the morning using Lambda and EventBridge — saving up to 65% on non-production AWS costs without anyone lifting a finger.

You have built a React app, a portfolio, or a landing page and you want to put it on your own domain with proper SSL. This guide covers the full setup — S3 bucket for storage, CloudFront as your CDN for fast global delivery, Route 53 for DNS, ACM for a free SSL certificate, and proper routing so your single-page app does not break when someone refreshes on a deep link.

You have dockerized your app and now you need somewhere to run it. ECS Fargate lets you run containers without managing any servers — no EC2 instances to patch, no cluster capacity to worry about. This guide takes you through the full setup: task definitions, services, load balancer integration, auto-scaling based on CPU and memory, and pulling secrets from AWS Secrets Manager so nothing sensitive ends up in your code.

Storing AWS access keys in GitHub secrets is a security risk that most teams accept because they do not know a better way. There is one — OIDC lets GitHub Actions assume an IAM role directly without any long-lived credentials. This guide sets up the full pipeline: ECR repository with image scanning, OIDC trust between GitHub and AWS, and deployment workflows you can copy straight into your repo for ECS or EKS.

Spinning up an RDS instance through the AWS console takes five minutes. Setting it up properly for production takes a lot more thought. This guide covers what actually matters — placing your database in private subnets where it cannot be reached from the internet, enabling encryption at rest and in transit, configuring automated backups with the right retention, switching to gp3 storage to save money, and turning on Performance Insights so you can spot slow queries before your users do.

By default Terraform stores state locally. The moment a second person joins your project, local state becomes a problem — no locking, no versioning, no collaboration. This guide sets up S3 for encrypted state storage and DynamoDB for locking so two people never corrupt the state by running apply at the same time.

An honest comparison from someone who has used both. Terraform wins on ecosystem, multi-cloud, syntax, and modules. CloudFormation wins on automatic rollback and zero state management. This guide covers the real trade-offs with side-by-side code examples so you can pick the right tool for your team.

Most AWS accounts have the same problems — root with no MFA, developers with AdministratorAccess, access keys that have not been rotated in years. This guide covers practical IAM patterns that work in production: scoped policies, tag-based access control, MFA enforcement for destructive actions, and using Access Analyzer to find unused permissions.