I finally Deployed on AWS

My first experience with AWS went horribly. This was way back in like 2023 and AWS had a free tier for 12 months.

I decided to take it for a spin to set up a server to host one of my hobby projects.

So, I set up my free server and all was right with the world, till it happened. I got debited.

I was surprised. I thought I was on a free tier. Why are they taking my money?

I complained to their support and apparently I was using some other resources that were outside the free tier. A lot of stuff that I didn’t understand were said. I just wanted the debit to end.

The dude at the other end said no problem, they would end the debit. And he told me he did.

Only for me to get debited again the next month. I went back to complain and apparently there was still some obscure service running that was billing me. Dude said he would deactivate it and I said no problem.

Only for me to get debited the next month again. This back and forth continued for about six months until I was free of the shackles of AWS. I even tried nuking the account for good and AWS told me mafia style that if I nuked the account, they didn’t want to see my face around their corner ever again.

This whole experience left me wary of the whole enterprise. And I decided to deploy future hobby apps on platforms like Heroku or Render.

But I noticed that having some experience with AWS was a requirement on a lot of job descriptions. So I decided to give it a spin again.

Tried watching tutorials to get a lay of the land, only to be confronted with 12 hour videos on how to get a certification. I didn’t give two hoots about that as I just wanted to take the thing for a spin.

I finally speedran through the shortest video I could find – about 3 hours, and I felt I was ready to give it a try again.

During my tutoring, I apparently discovered AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It promised to make all my wildest dreams come true. I even watched the ad for beanstalk on YouTube and it was a sight to behold.

The animation was smooth. It promised to make everything easy. Just push your code and AWS would handle all the bells and whistles.

So I went for it, and proceeded to regret it. It was just errors upon errors. And for me to see the logs, I had to manually request it on the console and it would load for a while, etc.

It got so bad at a point that I could no longer even see the logs. I requested on the console, nothing. I decided to used use the eb cli, nothing. I restarted the EBS environment, nothing. Terminated the EC2 instance, nothing.

So after about 3 days of back and forth, I said fuck it and binned the whole thing.

Decided to go back to basics and just set up a server on an EC2 instance. I set up a systemd service, fiddled with nginx, and so on and so forth.

Lo and behold I was able to get everything up and running in about half a day. I have the backend of my AI chatbot running on EC2 and the frontend hosted for free on Vercel. You can take it for a spin.

What is the moral lesson? Well, I don’t know, but I did sure learn a lot of technical lessons. Sometimes, going back to the basics is the right way to go.