Week 5 Worklog

Week 5 Objectives

• Identify and resolve abnormal AWS costs on the account.
• Design and partition infrastructure architecture for the project.
• Begin initial project configuration and assign team roles.
• Explore AWS Skill Builder and advance learning on optimization topics.
• Workshop: Complete VPC Network Setup and begin Database & Storage Setup.

Tasks Completed This Week

AWS Skill Builder Courses Completed

Week 5 Achievements

Technical Skills Acquired:

Cost Optimization:

• Identified causes of abnormal AWS costs:
  • Incomplete deletion of EC2 resources (EBS volumes, Elastic IPs)
  • Lack of control over user accounts and IAM permissions
  • Resources left running in unused regions
• Learned AWS cost management best practices:
  • AWS Budgets for proactive cost alerts
  • Cost Explorer for analyzing spending patterns
  • Service Quotas for managing account limits
  • Billing Console Delegation for team cost visibility
• Proposed cost optimization measures for the team

Architecture Design:

• Successfully designed project infrastructure architecture
• Created reference architecture templates for team adoption
• Applied High Availability principles:
  • Multi-AZ deployments
  • Load balancing strategies
  • Database replication patterns
  • Fault-tolerant design patterns

Development Environment:

• Set up AWS Toolkit for VS Code for streamlined development
• Mastered AWS CLI for command-line operations
• Built robust code skeleton with initial configuration files
• Established project foundation for team collaboration

Database Services:

• Understood Amazon RDS for relational database needs
• Learned DynamoDB for NoSQL workloads
• Explored ElastiCache for in-memory caching (Redis/Memcached)
• Applied database selection criteria based on use cases

Project Progress:

• Registered and activated AWS Skill Builder account
• Began exploring advanced courses and learning paths
• Infrastructure architecture finalized and documented
• Development environment configured and ready for coding

Workshop Progress - Network & Database Setup:

• Completed NAT Gateway deployment in both public subnets for private subnet internet access
• Configured Security Groups for ALB, ECS, RDS, and ElastiCache tiers with least-privilege access
• Set up route tables: Public routes to Internet Gateway, Private routes to NAT Gateways
• Designed RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ configuration for high availability
• Planned ElastiCache Redis cluster for session management and caching
• Configured S3 buckets for static assets and document storage

Key Takeaways:

• Cost optimization starts with visibility - use Cost Explorer daily
• Right-sizing EC2 instances can reduce costs by 30-50%
• High availability requires planning across multiple AZs
• AWS Toolkit for VS Code significantly improves developer productivity
• Database selection depends on data model, scale, and access patterns
• Service Quotas prevent unexpected capacity limitations
• NAT Gateways enable private subnet resources to access internet securely
• Security Groups provide defense-in-depth with multiple layers of protection