Step 5 — AWS essentials

AWS has 200+ services, but you start with these five.

1. VPC — virtual network

VPC (10.0.0.0/16)
├── Public Subnet  (10.0.1.0/24) ← Internet Gateway
└── Private Subnet (10.0.2.0/24) ← NAT only

Web servers in Public, DBs in Private.

2. EC2 — virtual servers

t3.micro (free tier) → r7gd.metal. Pick by:

• vCPU + memory
• Storage (EBS gp3)
• OS (Amazon Linux 2023, Ubuntu 24.04)

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id ami-... \
  --instance-type t3.micro \
  --key-name my-key \
  --security-group-ids sg-...

3. RDS — managed databases

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Aurora… AWS handles backups and patches.

EC2 (Public) ─┐
              ├─ RDS PostgreSQL (Private, 5432)
EC2 (Public) ─┘

Start small (db.t4g.micro ≈ $15/mo), scale up later.

4. S3 — object storage

aws s3 mb s3://my-bucket
aws s3 cp local.png s3://my-bucket/path/to/file.png
aws s3 sync ./build s3://my-static-site --delete

99.999999999% durability. First 5 GB free.

5. IAM — permissions

• User — person or external system
• Role — service (EC2, Lambda) borrows temporary creds
• Policy — JSON rules
• Group — set of users

Least privilege: never put AdministratorAccess keys in code.

6 (bonus). Cost Explorer

Daily glance prevents surprise bills.

Try it

Free-tier EC2 + RDS, connect EC2→RDS Postgres. Tear down after to stay free.

Going deeper

• AWS overview
• VPC + subnets
• EC2
• RDS
• S3
• IAM

Next

Step 6 — Fly.io for the simple alternative.