This chapter is a step-by-step walk-through of creating an AWS cloud environment. The environment is specifically geared toward analytics and uses AWS best practices. Along with screenshots and instructions on setting things up, there will be explanations of what is being done and why. This walk-through will incur AWS usage charges. Make sure to delete all the resources after the walk-through if you do not intend on keeping the environment running as the total cost could be over $130 USD for a full month. Starting and stopping the EC2 instances as needed can reduce the cost somewhat.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• AWS CloudFormation
• Setting a best practice virtual private cloud setup:
  • NAT gateway
  • Bastion hosts
• How to terminate and clean up the environment