This chapter was a quick and simple introduction to AWS and its most well-known service, EC2. After signing up for AWS, we configured our environment in such a way that we could create a virtual server using the command-line interface. Leading to this, we selected our first AMI, created our first security group, and generated our ssh keys, which we will reuse throughout the book. After launching an EC2 instance, we manually deployed a simple node.js application to display Hello World.

While the process wasn't very fastidious thanks to the AWS CLI, it still required going through numerous steps which aren't very repeatable. We also deployed the application without any automation or validation. Furthermore, the only way we can check if the application is running is by manually checking the endpoint. In the remainder of the book, we will revisit the process of creating and managing web applications and infrastructure but this time, we will follow the DevOps principles and incorporate their best practices.

Chapter 3, Treating Your Infrastructure As Code, will address one of the first issues we encountered: managing our infrastructure with automation. To do that, we must write code to manage our infrastructure.