Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Me

I began my second job as a Developer 2 weeks ago.

I joined a well established web development company in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Till date, I am enjoying almost everything about the city.

But to be honest, I am bored of my work. And that's why I wanted to learn something part time at night. I did a research on which technology should I learn. I have some experience with Laravel and Node.js, but I never mastered them. So, I decided I will learn both. First, Laravel.

But, before that I wanted to have a proper setup where I will deploy my project. I can do it in my local system, but that's not cool enough.

So, I decided to deploy it on my Amazon Web Service Free Tier Account.

Now, Let's get to the motive of this post. AWS and Me. It's not a very interesting story and I'm sure some of you might gone through what I am going to tell. But, I hope some newbie (newer than me) will find some help out of it. So, I think it's worth sharing.

The story of AWS and me began in 2016 when I first discovered the service. I was studying my 2nd year B.Tech back then, and I have no idea what AWS was. I was also pretty sure that none of my faculties didn't know sh*t about it either.

One fine afternoon, I was sitting alone inside our Programming Lab, out of curiosity and being a lover of free stuffs, I create a free tier account. That was the first time I laid eyes on the AWS Management Console.

No, it wasn't a love at first sight as I did not understand her. As time passes, I came to know that it was a cloud service with lots of stuffs. But, I never reach out to her until the end of 2017.

It was 17th December, 2017. I still remember everything clearly. I stay at home, just switching between Social Media apps. I saw a post that says Bitcoin price has gone up to 13,77,202 Indian Rupees. F*ck. I could have mined a lot or bought some.

The same day, guess what? I saw a post about AWS. I went to AWS website, tried to log in to my free tier account. The free tier account has expired. So, I create another account using another email, another Debit Card, which I happen to have.

I create an EC2 Ubuntu 16.04 server instance, log on to the server using SSH and guess what I did? mining cryptocurrencies. Thinking back, I don't know why I waste all the resources either. I set up around 6 instances at a time and start a miner program in all of it, using up 99% of the CPU resource. I even proudly showed them to one of my faculty. He told me, "Why waste your time and all those CPU resource? You will get nothing back. Do something useful with it.". And he is correct about me getting back nothing.

After a month, I have a debt of around 150 US Dollars on my AWS account. Of course, I did not pay, and get suspended.

That was the second time I came across AWS. It wasn't pretty.

The third time was a little different. It was around March or April, 2018. Being a senior student, having some experience with AWS, I was approached by my juniors who are in-charge of developing web application for the college fest. I tell them everything I know, which I think was sufficient for them (?). I helped them with some thing and they made the best out of their free tier account, unlike me. The third time was a little better than the previous ones.

After a year, here I am, trying to make the most out of my third AWS Free Tier Account.

AWS always wanted to impress me, and she did. But, somehow, I was a jerk every time we met. She was hoping that I make the most out of her. Giving me chances.

My third debit card is used, which is one reason why I should make the best use of it, so that we will live happily ever after.

Alright, story's over. Next post, I will share how I configure LAMP stack on Ubuntu 18.04 server, which you could find in many places on the internet. But, I want my version of it. So, see you soon.



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