The web is a hostile environment. There are good and bad actors. Bad actors can try to poke holes in your security or try to bring down your website with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Good actors, if you're lucky, will love your website and won't stop using it. They'll shower you with recommendations to improve your site, but also, they may run into bugs and they may be so enthusiastic that your site may slow down to a crawl due to high traffic. Real-world deployments on the web require a lot of expertise to get it right. As a full-stack developer, you can only know about so many nuances of hardware, software, and networking. Luckily, with the advent of cloud service providers, a lot of this expertise has been translated into software configurations, with the difficult hardware and networking concerns taken care of by the provider.
One of the best features of a cloud service provider is cloud scalability, which refers to your server automatically scaling out to respond to high volumes of unexpected traffic and scaling down to save costs when the traffic returns back to normal levels. Amazon Web Services (AWS) goes beyond basic cloud scalability and introduces high-availability and fault tolerant concepts, allowing for resilient local and global deployments. I have chosen to introduce you to AWS, because of its vast capabilities that go way beyond what I will touch in this book. With Route 53, you can get free DDoS protection; with API Gateway, you create API keys, with AWS Lambda you can handle millions of transactions for only a few dollars a month and with CloudFront you can cache your content at secret edge-locations that are scattered around major cities of the world. In addition, Blue-Green deployments will allow you to achieve no-downtime deployments of your software.
Overall, the tools and techniques you will be learning in this chapter are adaptable to any cloud provider and is fast becoming critical knowledge for any full-stack developer. We will be going over the following topics:
- Creating and protecting AWS accounts
- Right-sizing infrastructure
- Simple load testing to optimize instance
- Configuring and deploying to AWS ECS Fargate
- Scripted Blue-Green deployments
- Billing