Recently, I finished reading Amazon Web Services in Action and have a few suggestions to share. Many software engineers struggle with learning system design, and I believe that setting up a production-ready WordPress installation is a great, hands-on way to start exploring system design concepts.
Reading Amazon Web Services in Action allowed me to explore AWS DevOps tools and master new system design concepts.
The book is easy to read, but I needed a month to master all the essential AWS tools and be able to deploy a production-ready web service.
Amazon Web Services in Action
Third Edition
by Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig
Released: March 2023
Publisher: Manning
ISBN: 9781633439160
If you are learning Amazon Web Services, I suggest this book and maybe a personal project that you are really motivated to work on. This will give you a real reason to learn things in detail.
In my case, I went deep into learning all the details to deploy a production-ready WordPress website:
Domain management and SSL certificates
AWS IAM User management
AWS S3 for backup and CDN
AWS Certificate Manager
AWS CloudFront distribution for CDN
AWS SES for transactional email and newsletter
AWS RDS Relational Database Service
AWS ELB Elastic Load Balancing
AWS EC2 setup
Linux configuration: MySQL, NGINX, Redis, PHP 8.4
Fail2ban for basic security
Free Cloudflare WAF rules
WordPress installation and configuration
If you think a production-ready WordPress is a toy project, it is maybe because you have no idea about all the struggles to have a safe, fast, and responsive website. I learned tons about system design with this adventure and I recommend.
For the Linux configuration, you can either develop your own bash script or learn Ansible to automate the tasks.
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