AWS

Most applications start life on a single server. It works fine until deployments get risky, scaling means manually spinning up more servers, and “it works on my machine” becomes a recurring problem. Containers solve this, and on AWS, ECS is the most direct path to running them in production.  What Docker Actually Solves  A Docker container packages your application with everything it needs to run — code, runtime, libraries, configuration — into a single unit. That unit behaves the same on a developer’s laptop, in staging, and in production.  Where ECS Fits In  Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is AWS’s platform for running containers at scale. It handles scheduling, scaling, and health checks so you are not manually managing where each container runs.  For most growing businesses, ECS on Fargate removes an entire layer of operational work — no instance patching, no capacity planning for the cluster itself.  Setting Up a Basic ECS Deployment  Common Mistakes to Avoid  Is It Worth the Migration?  If your team is deploying manually, scaling by adding more identical servers, or fighting environment inconsistencies, moving to Docker and ECS pays for itself quickly in reduced deployment risk and faster releases. For simple, low-traffic applications, it can be more infrastructure than necessary — the right call depends on how much your deployment process is currently costing you in time and incidents. 

Every AWS project eventually runs into the same question: where should this actually run? The answer is not the same for every workload, and picking the wrong one either costs you more than it should or slows your team down with infrastructure work nobody wanted to do.  Here is how the three main compute options actually differ.  EC2 — Full Control, Full Responsibility  EC2 gives you a virtual machine. You choose the operating system, install what you need, and manage patching, scaling, and security yourself.  If your application looks the same today as it did last month in terms of load, EC2 is usually the most cost-predictable choice.  Lambda — Pay Only When Code Runs  Lambda runs your code in response to an event — an API call, a file upload, a scheduled trigger — and disappears when it is done. There is no server to patch or manage.  For workloads that run occasionally or spike unpredictably, Lambda often costs a fraction of an equivalent EC2 setup.  Fargate — Containers Without Managing Servers  Fargate runs your Docker containers without you provisioning or managing the underlying EC2 instances. You define the container, and AWS handles the infrastructure.  A Practical Way to Decide  Many businesses end up running all three side by side — EC2 for a core application, Lambda for background processing, and Fargate for containerized services. The mistake is picking one and forcing every workload into it. Match the compute model to what the workload actually needs, and the AWS bill usually takes care of itself. 

Every public-facing web application receives traffic it never asked for — scanners probing for vulnerabilities, bots scraping content, and occasionally, a deliberate attempt to take the site down. AWS WAF and Shield are the two services built specifically to handle that traffic before it reaches your application.  AWS WAF — Filtering Requests Before They Reach You  WAF (Web Application Firewall) sits in front of your application — typically attached to CloudFront, an Application Load Balancer, or API Gateway — and filters incoming requests based on rules you define.  AWS Shield — DDoS Protection  Shield protects against Distributed Denial of Service attacks, where attackers flood your infrastructure with traffic to make it unavailable.  Most small and mid-sized businesses are adequately covered by Shield Standard combined with a properly configured WAF. Shield Advanced becomes worth the cost for businesses where downtime has a direct, significant revenue impact.  Setting This Up Properly  What Gets Missed  Together, WAF and Shield form the first layer of defense for anything public-facing. Neither replaces good application security practices, but both stop a large share of attacks before your application ever has to deal with them. 

IAM (Identity and Access Management) controls who can do what inside your AWS account, and it is where most preventable security incidents actually originate. Not through sophisticated attacks, but through permissions that were broader than they needed to be.  The Principle That Matters Most  Least privilege means every user, role, and service only has the permissions it needs to do its specific job — nothing more. It sounds obvious, but most AWS accounts drift away from it over time as permissions get added for convenience and never removed.  Practical Steps to Get There  Auditing What You Already Have  Service-to-Service Permissions  Common Mistakes  Why This Matters More Than It Seems  A misconfigured security group or an unpatched server is a specific, fixable problem. An IAM role with excessive permissions is a standing risk that sits quietly until something goes wrong — and when it does, the blast radius is defined by exactly how much access that role had. Reviewing IAM permissions is not a one-time setup task; it is something that needs revisiting as the account and team grow. 

A VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is the network foundation everything else in your AWS account sits on. Get it wrong early, and you end up re-architecting under pressure later. Get it right, and it quietly supports years of growth without a second thought.  Start With Subnet Separation  This separation alone prevents an entire category of accidental exposure.  Plan Your IP Ranges Before You Need To  Security Groups and NACLs Serve Different Purposes  Most teams over-rely on wide-open security groups. Scope rules to specific ports and specific source security groups rather than open CIDR ranges wherever possible.  Multi-AZ by Default  Connecting to the Outside World  Things Businesses Get Wrong  A well-designed VPC is not something end users ever notice — which is exactly the point. It should quietly enforce security and support growth without becoming a project of its own six months from now. 

Kubernetes on AWS (EKS): Is It Right for Your Business?  Kubernetes has become the default answer to “how do we run containers at scale,” but it is not the right answer for every team. Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) makes running Kubernetes on AWS more manageable, but it does not remove the complexity that comes with Kubernetes itself.  What EKS Actually Manages For You  EKS runs and manages the Kubernetes control plane — the component responsible for scheduling, scaling, and coordinating your containers. AWS handles its availability, patching, and upgrades.  What EKS does not remove is the complexity of Kubernetes itself — namespaces, deployments, services, ingress controllers, and the YAML that ties it all together.  When EKS Makes Sense  When It Is Probably More Than You Need  A large share of businesses that adopt Kubernetes do so because it is the industry standard, not because their architecture demands it. The result is often a small team managing a system built for much larger scale.  A Simpler Path First  If you are unsure, ECS on Fargate solves container orchestration for the vast majority of business applications without the learning curve or the ongoing maintenance Kubernetes requires. Moving to EKS later, once your architecture genuinely needs multi-service, multi-team orchestration at scale, is far easier than reversing an over-engineered Kubernetes setup that a small team is struggling to maintain.  If You Do Move to EKS  Choose EKS because your architecture needs it, not because it is what everyone else is running. 

An AWS bill has dozens of line items, cryptic service names, and charges that appear without obvious explanation. Most business owners hand it to their technical team and hope for the best. That is understandable — but the business owner who understands their cloud spend has a significant advantage when it comes to controlling costs.  Here is what the main charges actually mean and where your money is most likely going.  Where to Find Your Bill  Go to the AWS Console → Billing and Cost Management → Bills. You will see a monthly summary broken down by service. Click into any service to see the regional breakdown.  AWS Cost Explorer is more useful for analysis — it lets you visualise spending over time, filter by service, region, and tag, and spot trends before they become problems.  The Biggest Cost Categories  EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)  This is usually the largest line item. It covers the compute instances running your servers. Within EC2 you will see:  RDS (Relational Database Service)  Database instance hours plus storage. If you see Multi-AZ in the description, you are paying for two instances (primary + standby). That is the right choice for production but unnecessary for non-critical environments.  S3  Storage cost per GB, PUT/GET request costs, and data transfer out. Most businesses are surprised by request costs — a high-traffic application making millions of S3 API calls can accumulate significant charges even with modest storage.  Data Transfer  AWS charges for data moving out of its network to the internet. Data transfer between AWS services in the same region is free. Data transfer between regions is not. This is a commonly overlooked cost driver for applications that move data between accounts or regions frequently.  What ‘Usage Type’ Means  Each line item has a Usage Type field that explains exactly what was consumed. For example:  Once you learn to read Usage Types, the bill becomes much clearer.  The Most Common Billing Surprises  Immediate Actions to Take 

Backup strategies fail in two ways: people do not set them up properly, or they set them up and never verify they actually work. Both lead to the same outcome when something goes wrong.  AWS Backup is a centralised service that automates backups across EC2, RDS, Aurora, EFS, DynamoDB, FSx, and Storage Gateway. One console, one set of policies, one audit trail.  What AWS Backup Covers  Before AWS Backup, you had to set up snapshot policies separately for each service. Now you define a Backup Plan — frequency, retention period, lifecycle to cold storage — and assign it to resources by tag.  Setting Up a Backup Plan  A Backup Plan has two components: rules and resource assignments.  Rules define when backups happen and how long they are kept. A typical production setup:  Resource assignments use tags. Tag your production RDS instance with Environment: production and assign that tag to your backup plan. Every resource with that tag is automatically backed up.  Cross-Region and Cross-Account Backup  For serious disaster recovery, copy backups to a different AWS region or a separate AWS account. AWS Backup supports both natively.  Cross-account backup is the most resilient option — even if someone accidentally deletes your AWS account or a ransomware attack encrypts your data, backups in a separate account remain untouched.  The Most Important Step: Test Your Restores  A backup you have never tested is not a backup — it is a hope. Schedule restore tests quarterly at minimum. Pick a random backup, restore it to a test environment, and verify the data is complete and usable.  AWS Backup has a restore testing feature that automates this. Configure it, run it, and get evidence that your backups are valid. This is also required for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance.  Backup vs Replication  Backup and replication are not the same thing. Multi-AZ RDS replication gives you high availability — if one AZ fails, the standby takes over. But replication copies everything, including accidental deletions. Backup gives you point-in-time recovery — the ability to go back to before something went wrong.  You need both for a complete data protection strategy.