Amazon Web Services

AWS was the cloud provider that I used, and from this point forward, I will not be using brand-agnostic terms. With that in mind, here are a few of the services and their jargon that you should know about:

EC2

These are Amazon's virtual machines. You pick the OS, the hardware, the storage, the security groups, the IAM roles. It's a computer in the cloud.

AMI

If you take a snapshot of an EC2, it's like Amazon takes every byte exactly where it is at a given time and freezes it into an AMI. It is super easy to make one and then create new EC2's from it. Think of it as a saved file that you can clone infinitely.

IAM

These are permissions in AWS. Wanna write to a database? You need IAM permissions for that. Wanna read a database? There's a SEPARATE IAM permission for that. If any services will interact with each other (and they will a whole damn lot), they need IAM permissions. Permissions are inside a Policy which is inside a Role.

S3

Basically Google Drive. You can write to it via a library called boto3, which is basically AWS tools that lets you interact with AWS outside of AWS. The basic unit of S3 is a bucket.

DynamoDB

A database service. It's NoSQL, meaning that you don't interact with it via a query language like SQL. In my opinion, this just makes it easier to view / interact with than some of AWS's SQL solutions like RDS.

Lambda

Lambdas are sick. They're basically serverless and stateless chunks of code that you can trigger in various ways (e.g. EventBridge). If you want to upload a new hot dog recipe to your S3 and your DynamoDB, one lambda can do both. They're like spaghetti strands that make sure information flows through your application.

API Gateway

This is how I called Lambdas from the frontend. You set up an endpoint that your app can hit like https://aws.gateway123/join/schedule and when you hit it, you decide what it does. I had it invoke lambdas with whatever payload my frontend sent.

Note: If I was hosting my domain on AWS, I would probably use something like Route 53, but I used Cloudflare. I'll get to that later.