Getting Started with my Blog on AWS

I work as a technology consultant, and it’s been some time since I’ve been hands-on (these days, I typically architect solutions on paper and the work with technology architects, designers, and developers to implement the solution). This blog will give me the opportunity, in a live environment, to get my hands dirty. Along the way, I’ll document what I’ve done, so others can follow (or use for their own purposes).

Step 1: Take AWS training. The best place to get instant hands-on experience is aws.qwiklabs.com. The website provides everything you need to learn about AWS and to build working examples.¹

Step 2: Sign up for a free account. And yes, free means free, for the most part (more on that later).

Step 3: Build a LAMP server. The instructions here (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/install-LAMP.html) are easy peasy.

Step 4: Install WordPress. Again, super simple instructions (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/hosting-wordpress.html)

Step 5: Configure WordPress, download plugins, templates, etc. This is at the discretion of the blog owner; however, if nothing else, I suggest you install the WP Offload S3 plugin. It allows you to store your blog media and images to S3 bucket.

Note: While I was working on this step, I configured my blog to be only viewable to me. There are a number of ways to do this; I decided to restrict the inbound http and https traffic to my IP block.

Step 6: Upload my old blog posts from my blogger account. Like I said in my first post, I wanted to re-host my old post here, so I used another plugin to import the blogger xml.

Step 7: Set up my custom domain name. First, I set up a Elastic IP (for my EC2 instance), and then used that IP when registering my new domain with Route 53. Note: Remember step 2 (set up the free account). This part isn’t free: $12/year for the domain, and a small amount (less than $1/month) to process requests to the server.

1. In addition to the modules on qwiklabs, I also attended an excellent three-day session titled “Architecting on AWS”. That class would be overkill for building a blog, but is must-need for anyone looking to build robust, enterprise systems in AWS.