AWS

Intro

Think of Amazon Web Services (AWS) like a massive digital warehouse full of building blocks for creating technology projects. Just like you might rent an apartment instead of buying a house, AWS lets you rent computing resources instead of buying physical servers and equipment. This means you can build websites, run applications, store data, and do complex calculations without needing to own any of the physical hardware

At Blueprint, we mainly AWS to run our staging environments, tho we also leverage some of it's other functionalities when we're working with various NPOs.

EC2

Imagine your laptop or desktop computer - it has a processor, memory (RAM), storage, and an operating system. An EC2 instance is very similar, but it exists in AWS's data centers instead of physically sitting on your desk. Here's how it relates to what you already know:

  1. Virtual Machines vs EC2:

The key differences from a regular VM on your computer:

Security Groups and SSH keys

Security Groups (The Firewall):

Think of a security group like a bouncer at a club who checks IDs. It controls what traffic can reach your EC2 instance and what traffic can leave it. For example:

SSH Keys (Your Digital Key):


Just like you need a physical key to enter your house, you need a digital key to connect securely to your EC2 instance. 

Windows: https://www.purdue.edu/science/scienceit/ssh-keys-windows.html

Linux/macOS: open the terminal and type "ssh-keygen -t ed25519", follow the prompts and it will tell you where it saved the keys.

The file ending in .pub is the publickey, and the other one is the private key.

VPC

A VPC is like having your own private section of AWS's cloud, similar to having your own isolated network. Think of it like a university campus:

Main VPC Concepts:

Subnets:

Network Components: