On a recent conference (HackConf) I gave a talk where I tried to summarize how to do deployment and horizontal scaling on AWS. It is an overview of AWS resources (instance, load balancers, auto-scaling groups, security groups) as well as how to use CloudFormation to script your stack.

It briefly mentions the application layer and how it should look like (because another talk on the same conference was focused on that part). My point here is summarized as: ““You cannot scale an unscalable application”. But the talk continues to discuss AWS specific things, although many of them have their nearly identical counterparts in other IaaS providers (e.g. Google Cloud, Azure).

The video of the talk can be seen here:

And the slides are here:

As someone summarized on twitter: “That talk is approximately a year worth of learning experience with AWS in 40 minutes”. This is a benefit and a drawback, as it might be too condensed and too shallow, but I think I’ve covered important bits with enough depth for a starting point.

One of my points was that for simpler setups you don’t need fancy tools and platforms (docker, kubernetes, etc.) – as you’ll have to use bash anyway, you can go with just bash + CloudFormation and have a perfectly good, highly-available, blue-green deployment setup.

The other main points where: “think about your infrastructure as code”, and “consider all your resources dispensable, as they will surely die at some point”. Overall, I hope the talk is useful for everyone using or planning to use AWS, or any other IaaS provider.