My First Time Putting an App on AWS (A Beginner's Story)
Today I did something I've wanted to do for a while — I took an app running on my own laptop and put it "live" on the internet using AWS. It sounds scary when you read about it online, but once I actually did it, it was just a bunch of small, simple steps, one after another. This post is me writing down everything I did, in plain, easy words, so that if you're a beginner like me, you can follow along without getting confused by fancy tech terms. What is AWS, in simple words? AWS (Amazon Web Services) is basically Amazon renting out computers over the internet. Instead of buying your own physical server and keeping it running 24/7 at home, you "rent" a computer from Amazon. That computer runs your app, and anyone with the internet can visit it. The specific service I used is called EC2 . Think of EC2 as one virtual computer that lives in Amazon's data center, and you get to control it like it's your own. Step 1: Set up IAM first Before touching any servers, I went to IAM (Identity and Access Management). This is AWS's way of managing "who is allowed to do what" in your account. In simple words: instead of using your main AWS login for everything (which is risky), IAM lets you create a separate user with its own permissions. It's like giving someone a spare key instead of your master key. I set this up first so my account stays safer. Step 2: Launch an EC2 instance Next, I went to the EC2 section and launched a new instance (a fancy word for "a virtual computer"). During this step, AWS also lets you create a .pem file — this is basically a secret key file. It's like a digital key to a lock. Only someone with this file can get into the server. I downloaded it and kept it safe, because if you lose it, you can't easily get back in. Step 3: Login to the server using SSH Once the server (EC2 instance) was ready, I needed a way to "log in" to it from my own laptop. For that, I used something called SSH, along with the .pem key file I downloaded earlier. In simple words: SSH