DevOps and AWS Guide: From Git Push to Production

Before touching a single server, understand what problem AWS is actually solving for you. No cost, no server — only clear thinking, plus a safe account setup.

Every EC2 server is a Linux box with no screen. Filesystem, permissions, users, processes — and the fix for “my app dies when I close the terminal”.

How a browser request actually finds and reaches your server. The layer Vercel hides completely, and the one you must understand before EC2 makes any sense.

How a domain name turns into a server address — records, TTL, Route 53, and the one wildcard record that serves unlimited customer subdomains for a multi-tenant SaaS.

What the padlock in your address bar actually proves, how a free certificate gets issued, and the exact commands to put HTTPS on your own EC2 server.

Who is allowed to do what in your AWS account. Users, groups, policies, roles and least privilege — the lesson that protects you from the expensive mistakes, and it costs nothing to set up.

Your own private network inside AWS. Public and private subnets, how traffic gets in and out, and where your database hides.

SSH in, install Node, clone, .env, build, and keep it alive with PM2 — the manual deploy every later lesson automates.

A real database that AWS backs up, patches and fails over for you — and how to connect it privately from your app server.

Images, layers, Dockerfiles and Compose — build once, run the same thing on your laptop and on EC2.

The receptionist in front of your app: TLS termination, static files, compression, and why port 3000 never goes public.

One server becomes many. Health checks, target groups, and servers that appear when traffic spikes and vanish when it drops.

Lint, test, build and deploy on every push — automatically, with no one SSH-ing into a server.

Describe your whole cloud in files, review it in pull requests, and rebuild it in minutes.

Knowing what your system is doing before your users tell you: metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards.

Locking down what you built: patching, secrets, least privilege, automated backups and tested restores.

Where the money goes, how to cut it, and the complete architecture you have built — box by box.

“It works on my machine” ends here. What containers really are (and aren't), images, layers and registries, a production-grade multi-stage Dockerfile, running and composing containers locally, tags vs digests, and the security basics.

Running 300 containers across 40 machines by hand doesn't work. How Kubernetes turns “what I want” into “what's running”: the control plane and nodes, the reconciliation loop, pods, deployments, services and ingress, health probes, resources and autoscaling — and whether you need it at all.

Friday-evening deploys that need three people and a prayer are optional. CI that catches problems before merge, continuous delivery vs deployment, rolling, blue-green and canary releases — with a simulator — feature flags, zero-downtime database migrations and the DORA metrics.

Containers versus VMs, Kubernetes objects, probes, rollouts, Helm, platform choice, IAM, Terraform state, secrets and cost.

Vercel deploys, Docker for Node, GitHub Actions, feature flags, safe rollouts and migrations, Sentry, OpenTelemetry and SLOs.

Ten scaling stages with trigger, change and cost, the metric that tells you, AWS services in plain words, and a queueing arithmetic demo.

Nginx, PM2, load balancers, CDN, RDS, VPC, Redis, Docker, CI/CD, Terraform, CloudWatch — what each one is, the problem it solves, where it sits in the flow, and the minimal “how”, before its own lesson.

Vercel, Railway, Render, Dokploy, Coolify, AWS, Kubernetes — where each one fits, and why the real question is stateless vs persistent.