First Deployment

You’ve successfully deployed all the way to production. Now that you’ve done this at least once, you can have confidence that you can do it again for every forthcoming change. This will help you work in small steps, focusing on what you can do to make your app better and getting it out to the customers who might want to use it.

Next Steps

Now that you understand how to deploy an app to Amazon S3, here are some additional topics you might want to investigate.

AWS Regions

All AWS services run in data centers located in multiple locations around the world, called regions. Running your application in parallel across multiple regions is a great way to ensure high availability, even in the face of catastrophic failure or natural disaster.

When choosing a region, first ensure that the services you need are available in that region. You’ll also want to consider things like where your users are located and where any supporting non-AWS servers are located (like email servers, for example).

Creating a Test Environment

We just touched on it in this chapter, but as you work through this tutorial, you may want to set up a complete test environment, configured the same way as the production environment. Since it’s just a tutorial, you can easily make an argument that it’s not worth it, but going through the process will help you understand some of the configuration issues you run into when supporting two environments. Whether you try to figure that out now or leave it for later is a judgment call you’ll need to make.

IAM Lockdown

The administrative user we created for this app has access to every service in your account. Once you get more familiar with the services you need (and don’t need), it makes sense to remove the blanket administrator policy for this user and add some more fine-grained policies, to only allow it access to the services it actually needs.

Now we’re ready to move on to bigger and better things. In the next chapter, we’ll add a client-side router to our application, support multiple application views, and do something about that button that doesn’t work!