Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most mature and comprehensive cloud computing platform available today, and as such it was a natural choice for BubbleCorp to host its infrastructure in.
If you haven't used AWS before, don't worry, we'll focus only on a few of its services:
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): A service that provides users with the ability to rent virtual computers in which to run their applications.
- Relational Database Service (RDS): This can be thought of as a specialized version of EC2 that provides managed database services.
- CloudFormation: With CloudFormation, users have the ability to specify infrastructure templates, called stacks, of several different AWS resources—such as EC2, AWS, and many others—as well as how they interact with each other. Once written, the infrastructure template can be sent to AWS to be executed.
For BubbleCorp, the idea was to write these infrastructure templates, which once submitted would result into a completely new, isolated environment containing all data and components required to run its app. At any given time, there would be dozens of these environments running with developers working on them.
As decent a plan as this sounds, big corporations usually have an added burden: cost centers. Unfortunately, BubbleCorp can't simply allow developers to log into the AWS Console—where we can manage AWS resources—and spin up environments at will. They needed a way to, among other things, add cost center metadata to the environment to handle their internal billing process.
This brings us to the application we will be focusing on for the remainder of this chapter.