Review: What We've Learned and What Our Deployment Looks Like

This lesson is a recap of all that we have learned so far and hopefully serves as a refresher if we want to look back on some topics.

AWS services

Let’s do a quick review of all the AWS services we have learned about so far:

• IAM: In the fourth chapter, we learned how to create IAM groups and IAM users and how to assign permissions to them. We learned when and when not to use the root user and how to create additional users. We have seen how we can create access keys to interact programmatically with AWS.

• EC2: We learned the most important aspects of EC2, AWS’s compute offering. EC2 stands for “Elastic Compute Cloud.”

  We have learned what an instance is (a virtual or physical cloud server), and we have seen the different instance types, how they are named, and which additional features they may provide.

  We have seen that some instances have burstable performance and others have a constant performance.

  Furthermore, we now know which operating systems we can run on EC2 under which licensing terms and the special requirements for Mac instances.

  We saw how we can provision different operating systems and whole software stacks on EC2 through AMIs (Amazon Machine Images).

• Security groups: We learned that security groups act like firewalls around EC2 instances and other AWS services. We learned to configure security groups to allow access to specific services.

• User data: We should now know how we can perform additional actions on the first start of an EC2 instance via EC2 user data. We learned that user data is executed as the root user on the EC2 instance.

• Launch templates: We have seen how we can create launch templates to simplify the deployment of applications on EC2. We have learned which parameters we can specify in a launch template and how it is versioned.

AWS CLI

So far, we have seen how we can interact with all the mentioned AWS services through the AWS CLI as well. We have learned which commands take which parameters and arguments and where to find documentation and help regarding the CLI.

Let’s review the commands we have seen so far in detail:

CLI credentials

aws configure list

• Allows us to view the current CLI configuration
• Allows us to see used credentials
• Allows us to see default region

CLI help

aws help
aws ec2 help

• The help command allows us to view the built-in help page for every command.
• It can be used with subcommands (like ec2) as well.

General CLI parameters