Recently, I got started with Well-Architected labs for AWS.
https://wellarchitectedlabs.com/
It is regarded as a guide for Best Practices to AWS deployments and administration. I will be going through the main parts of Operational Excellence here.
The first part of any AWS journey should be to not use your root user account to perform your tasks. Head on over to IAM to make a new user and new group to add them to. The group permissions should be set to include AdministratorAccess policy at the least.
Next part is a bit tricky. Go to Key Pair and make a new public and private key pair.
A pem file is usually the best choice. You can later access the EC2 machines via SSH.
ssh -i PEMFILE.pem username@IPorDomain
With access now secure and delegated to a user we can start the deploy process.
The lab gives you a template CloudFormation Script that is used to deploy multiple machines and the necessary networking infrastructure. You can enter it on:
https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
The important part of this deployment is to make your KeyName you made earlier so your pem file will work when you ssh to here later.
The nifty part of CloudFormation is the Designer tool that gives you a flowchart map of the different parts you are deploying:
You can go into EC2 and see the different machines and add optional settings like Tags or Security Group details. These help with admin tasks and can save you headaches later.
Once you are done we can add a feature that is useful called Systems Manager. But first we need to go back to IAM and add a role:
Once that is done, head back to EC2 and modify IAM roles of the instances. Actions > Security > Modify IAM role
You should be able to see Metadata from the instances you just modified and this will help going forward.
This is just the first part of the Well-Architected Labs and I may keep going on this if schedule allows. In any case, check out the labs and follow along. You will learn a lot.
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