AWS in Production

AWS in Production

About This Book

Dedication

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Why I Wrote This Book
2. Who This Book Is For
3. What This Book Covers
4. The Project Thread
5. Tools You Will Need
6. A Note on Cost
7. On Code Examples
8. One Thing Before You Start
9. Part 1: Core Serverless

Route 53 — DNS & Routing Basics

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why Start Here
4. How DNS Works
5. Concepts
6. Hands-On: Point a Custom Domain at an S3 Static Website
7. Production Patterns
8. Key Takeaways
9. What’s Next

Lambda — Functions & Execution Model

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why Lambda Changes the Architecture
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Deploy Your First Function
6. Production Patterns
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next

API Gateway — Building HTTP APIs

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why API Gateway
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: HTTP API with Lambda, Custom Domain, and CORS
6. Production Patterns
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next

CloudWatch Intro — Logs & Metrics

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why Observability Comes Before More Features
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Error Rate Alarm with Email Notification
6. Structured Logging Pattern
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next

Step Functions — Orchestrating Workflows

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. The Problem Step Functions Solves
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Order Processing Pipeline
6. Key Takeaways
7. What’s Next

Infrastructure as Code with Serverless Framework

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why Infrastructure as Code
4. Choosing Your Tool
5. Installing Serverless Framework
6. Concepts
7. Hands-On: Deploy the Part 1 Project with Serverless Framework
8. Key Takeaways
9. Part 2: AWS Services

IAM — Identity & Access Management

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why IAM Is the Most Important Service You’ll Ever Misconfigure
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Audit and Fix the Part 1 Roles
6. Cross-Account Access
7. Common IAM Anti-Patterns
8. Key Takeaways
9. What’s Next

ELB — Elastic Load Balancing

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why a Load Balancer
4. Concepts
5. VPC Quick Start
6. Hands-On: ALB in Front of a Lambda Function
7. Production Patterns
8. Key Takeaways
9. What’s Next

S3 — Object Storage

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. S3 Is Not a File System
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Upload Pipeline with Lambda Processing
6. Key Takeaways
7. What’s Next

SNS — Simple Notification Service

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. The Pub/Sub Mental Model
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Add Fan-Out to the Order Pipeline
6. Production Patterns
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next

SQS — Simple Queue Service

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why a Queue
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Async Job Queue for Image Processing
6. Key Takeaways
7. What’s Next

DynamoDB — NoSQL at Scale

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. DynamoDB Is Not a Relational Database
4. Concepts
5. Single-Table Design
6. Hands-On: Order Store with Single-Table Design
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next
9. Part 3: Security & Auth

JWT — Token-Based Authentication

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. The Authentication Problem
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Protect the Order API with Cognito
6. Common Mistakes
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next

Secret Management — SSM Parameter Store & Secrets Manager

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. The Credential Anti-Pattern
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Migrate Hardcoded Config to SSM
6. Production Patterns
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next

API Keys Transport — KMS & Secure Key Distribution

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Two Different Problems
4. Concepts
5. Secure API Key Vending
6. Audit Trail
7. Key Takeaways
8. Part 4: Containers

ECR — Elastic Container Registry

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why a Private Registry
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Push Your First Application Image to ECR
6. Production Patterns
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next

Docker on AWS

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. The Cost of a Naive Dockerfile
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Production Dockerfile for the API Service
6. Key Takeaways
7. What’s Next

ECS — Container Orchestration

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. From Lambda to Containers
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Deploy the API Service to ECS Fargate
6. Production Patterns
7. Key Takeaways
8. Part 5: Advanced

Advanced CloudWatch — Dashboards, Alarms & Insights

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. The Difference Between Monitoring and Observability
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Production Operations Dashboard
6. Production Patterns
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next

Step Functions Advanced — Complex State Machines

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Where Step Functions Earns Its Place
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: High-Value Order Approval Workflow
6. Production Patterns
7. Key Takeaways

CI/CD — Deploying to AWS from GitHub Actions

1. What You’ll Learn
2. Prerequisites
3. Why Automate Deployments
4. Concepts
5. Hands-On: Complete CI/CD Pipeline
6. Production Patterns
7. Key Takeaways
8. What’s Next

Appendix A — Complete System Architecture

1. The Order Processing Platform
2. Architecture Diagram
3. Service-to-Chapter Map
4. Request Flow: POST /orders (happy path)
5. Request Flow: POST /orders with amount > €500 (approval path)
6. Data Model: DynamoDB Single-Table (AppData)
7. IAM Role Map

Appendix B — Code Reference

1. Project Structure
2. Lambda Bootstrap Pattern
3. Config Loading from SSM (Chapter 14)
4. DynamoDB Single-Table Helpers (Chapter 12)
5. SQS Consumer with ReportBatchItemFailures (Chapter 11)
6. API Key Validation (Chapter 15)
7. Embedded Metric Format (Chapter 19)
8. Health Check Handler (Chapter 17)
9. Dockerfile (Chapter 17)
10. Makefile
11. serverless.yml (Chapter 6)
12. CloudWatch Logs Insights — Saved Queries
13. AWS CLI Quick Reference

Appendix C — Cost & Limits Reference

1. Free Tier Summary (per month, perpetual unless noted)
2. Cost Estimates for This Book’s Architecture
3. Service Limits (Soft = Adjustable, Hard = Fixed)
4. When to Request a Limit Increase
5. Cost Anomaly Detection

Appendix D — VPC in 10 Minutes

1. The Default VPC
2. The Three Building Blocks
3. Security Groups vs Network ACLs
4. VPC Endpoints
5. Key Takeaways

Glossary