Chapter 2. The 10-minute EC2 web server
Here’s where the real work of the book starts. So, technically speaking, now would be a good time to talk about whether AWS is right for you in the first place. In fact, AWS has a great tool called the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator (http://awstcocalculator.com) that lets you make apples-to-apples cost comparisons between your existing physical or locally hosted deployment and similar infrastructure running on the AWS cloud. But if we got into that discussion, this 10-minute EC2 web server would stretch out to at least a half an hour. Can’t have that, can we?
So I pushed the TCO Calculator back to chapter 9; feel free to jump ahead if you like. The rest of us will fearlessly dive right in and get the first simple version of the example company’s website up and running. Using nothing besides the Free Tier resources AWS makes available during an account’s first year, the goal is to have a functional HTML page all set to greet your global customers.
Although the website you’re going to build may be basic, the infrastructure you’ll put in place to support it could be used as the foundation for just about everything else you’ll do throughout the rest of this book. In other words, there’s nothing “junior varsity” about the tools you’re using now. Here’s what you’ll accomplish through the rest of this chapter: