33 posts tagged with "AWS"

Your monolith is decomposing into microservices. The Order Service needs to tell the Inventory Service, Payment Service, and Notification Service that a new order was placed. You could make three synchronous HTTP calls and hope none of them time out. Or you could use messaging — fire a message and let each service pick it up independently. AWS gives you three ways to do this, and picking the wrong one leads to lost messages, duplicate processing, or an architecture that fights you at every turn.

It's 3:17 AM. Your phone buzzes. "Site is down." You SSH into the server, tail the logs, see nothing obvious, check CPU — it's fine. Memory? Fine. Disk? 100% full. Log files ate the disk three hours ago, and nobody noticed because monitoring wasn't set up. CloudWatch exists so that you don't have to be the monitoring system. It collects metrics, aggregates logs, fires alarms, and pages you before users start tweeting.

The moment a second person runs terraform apply on the same project, local state files become a disaster. One person's laptop has the truth, the other has a stale copy, and the next apply either duplicates resources or deletes them. Remote state fixes this by storing your state in a shared location with locking, so two people can never write to it simultaneously. For AWS teams, the S3 + DynamoDB pattern is the industry standard.

Every time someone types your domain name into a browser, a DNS query races across the internet to find the IP address of your server. If DNS is slow, broken, or misconfigured, nothing else matters — your app is invisible. Route 53 is AWS's DNS service, and it does far more than translate names to IPs. It routes traffic intelligently, performs health checks, and can failover to a backup region in seconds.

Every AWS workload starts with a VPC. Click through the console once and you might get it right. Click through it for the fifth project and you will definitely get something wrong — a missing route, a misconfigured NAT gateway, a subnet that accidentally got a public IP. Terraform eliminates that problem. You define the network once, version it, and deploy identical VPCs across accounts, regions, and environments. This post builds a production-ready VPC from the ground up.

You've Dockerized your app, and it runs perfectly on your laptop. Now you need to run it in production — with load balancing, auto scaling, rolling deployments, and health checks. AWS gives you three ways to do this: ECS, Fargate, and EKS. Choosing wrong means either over-engineering a simple app or under-engineering a complex one. Let's break down exactly when to use each.