Where to begin an AWS project with an e-commerce focus?

DevOps AWS
#1

Hey, I am having a hard time figuring out where to start my project in AWS.
Some context - I’ve been learning AWS services for over 3 months now. My learning roadmap went like this (chronological order) - AWS CDK, VPC and its components, load balancer, API Gateway, some firewall services, Cloudfront, Route53, Certificate Manager, Cognito, ECS, ECR, Fargate, DynamoDB, communication and orchestration services like SNS, SQS, EventBridge, Step Functions, CI/CD services and most recently, I learnt about services like Secrets Manager, Parameter Store, AppConfig.

Now I am thinking where to start my e-commerce project. I have already setup environment specific different AWS accounts and configured my AWS CLI with all the profiles. My intuition says to start setting up the CI/CD pipeline and push infrastructure and application code little by little as it gets developed. But there is a little friction that is preventing me from getting my hands on right away - I feel I don’t want to miss something that is supposed to be set up in the initial stages of an AWS project. Need help regarding the same - is there any “checklist” that I can benefit from in the initial stages/setup of the project? (I know maybe I am overthinking)

#2

Hi there is no checklist as such. But if you already have some knowledge of AWS CDK, I would suggest going with the CI/CD approach first.

Figure out where you would like to version control the code. For example, say you choose GitHub, then start reading about GitHub Actions… then try setting up your first basic infrastructure/application. And then grow on that knowledge complimented with hands-on practice.

Hope this helps :smile:

#3

Sounds like you’re on the right track. There is no single right way to build a system… it depends a lot on your requirements (and constraints)

If you need a little project, this is quite useful:
https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/aws/

#4

It sounds like you are on a good path. I would suggest to just go for it right now.
Before going live and handle actual customer data maybe do a security review and see if it all is still in order.
You can use Services like Trusted Advisor and Security Hub to give some suggestions.
There are also lots of scanners, Checklists and so on. The suggestions can be a bit much for beginners, Don’t just blindly implement or fix everything they suggest. Understand the findings and try to figure out if and how this applies to your workload.
I will leave you with 3 security things to do / check right now:
Activate Cloudtrail
Activate Guard Duty
Activate MFA for the root and your admin user.

I’m guessing you have already done those since you have been learning about AWS for a few months. But it can’t hurt to check :smile:

#5

Thanks so much , , and for your suggestions :slight_smile: