AWS Roadmap

Step by step guide to becoming an Android developer.

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1 Development & Operations

Do not store application state on servers
Store extra information in your logs
If you need to interact with AWS, use the official SDK
Disable SSH access to all servers (Optional)
Have tools to view application logs
Care about service as a whole instead of servers
Don't give servers static/elastic IPs
Automate everything
Get your alerts to become notifications

2 Billing & Security

Set up granular billing alerts.
Everyone gets an IAM account. Never login to the master.
Prefer EC2 roles over app level IAM account.
Assign permissions to groups, not users.
Set up automated security auditing.
Use CloudTrail to keep an audit log.

3 S3 & EC2/VPC

S3:
Use "-" instead of "." in bucket names for SSL
Avoid filesystem mounts (FUSE, etc)
Use random strings at the start of your keys.
EC2/VPC:
Assign tags to everything.
Use termination protection for non-auto-scaling instances.
Use a VPC
Use reserved instances to save big $$$.
Lock down your security groups.
Don't keep unassociated Elastic IPs.

4 ELB, RDS & IAM

ELB (Elastic Load Balancing):
Terminate SSL on the load balancer.
Pre-warm your ELBs if you're expecting heavy traffic.
RDS (Relational Database Service):
Set up event subscriptions for failover.
IAM (Identity and Access Management):
Use IAM roles.
Users can have multiple API keys.
Use multi-factor auth for IAM users

5 CloudWatch, ElastiCache & Auto Scaling

CloudWatch:
Use CLI tools.
Use the free metrics.
Use the custom metrics.
Use detailed monitoring.
ElastiCache:
Use configuration endpoints over individual node endpoints.
Auto Scaling:
Scale down on INSUFFICIENT_DATA as well as ALARM.
Use ELB health check instead of EC2 health checks.
Only use the availability zones (AZs) your ELB is configured for.
Avoid multiple scaling triggers on the same group.

6 Route53, EMR & Misc

Route53:
Use ALIAS records.
Elastic MapReduce (EMR):
Specify a directory on S3 for Hive results.
Misc:
Scale horizontally
Always be redundant across availability zones (AZs).
Be aware of AWS service limits before you deploy.
Decide on a naming convention early, and stick to it.