Deploying a Web App on AWS: My Hands-On Experience & Challenges.

I just completed a lab using AWS resources to deploy an application on an Amazon EC2 instance. This application allows a café to accept online orders, and my task was to set it up in a development environment, then scale it by creating an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and launching a production instance in another AWS region.

Key Tasks and Challenges Faced

1. Analyzing an existing EC2 instance – Here I noted key details of the pre-configured instance.
2. Answering instance-related questions – AWS quizzes kept me on my toes! 😅
3. Connecting to the IDE on the EC2 instance – I used Amazon Cloud9 for the first time, which was exciting but had a learning curve.
4. Confirming the LAMP stack setup – Running ‘sudo’ commands helped me validate that the web server was accessible.
5. Installing the café application – A few command-line struggles later, I successfully downloaded and extracted the application files.
6. Testing the application – Placing an order didn’t work at first due to code errors! Debugging on an unfamiliar IDE was tricky, but I finaly got it running.
7. Creating an AMI & launching another EC2 instance – I cloned my existing setup, allowing the café website to scale effortlessly.
8. Verifying the new instance – I checked the EC2 console in Oregon to confirm that my ProdCafeServer was up and running.

Here are my key takeaways:
Hands-on experience with EC2, AMI, and multi-region deployment.
Troubleshooting & debugging on Amazon Cloud9.
Setting up and managing a LAMP stack in AWS.
Scaling applications efficiently using AMIs.

This lab reinforced real-world cloud architecture principles and challenged me to balance security, performance, scalability, and cost while ensuring resilience and automation. If you're working with AWS cloud, what's been your most exciting challenge so far? Let’s discuss!