Tag: aws

So You’re Terraforming Your First EC2 + S3 Bucket? Cool, Let’s Go

You’ve got AWS credentials exported in your shell (AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, maybe AWS_SESSION_TOKEN if you’re on temp creds). Terraform will just pick those up automatically — no need to hardcode anything. Good, let’s not do that ever.

1. Make a folder, make a file

mkdir my-first-tf && cd my-first-tf
touch main.tf

2. Tell Terraform which cloud and region

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-west-2"
}

That’s it. No access keys in the file — it reads them from your environment.

3. Spin up an EC2 instance

resource "aws_instance" "my_first_ec2" {
  ami           = "ami-0c101f26f147fa7fd" # Amazon Linux 2023, us-west-2
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  tags = {
    Name = "my-first-terraform-box"
  }
}

AMI IDs are region-specific. If you’re not in us-east-1, grab the right one from the AWS console (EC2 → Launch Instance → copy the AMI ID before hitting launch).

4. Create an S3 bucket

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "my_first_bucket" {
  bucket = "my-first-tf-bucket-change-this-name-12345"
}

Bucket names are globally unique across all of AWS, so my-bucket is taken. Add your name, a random number, whatever — just make it unique.

5. The magic three commands

terraform init      # downloads the AWS provider plugin
terraform plan       # shows you what it's ABOUT to do (read this!)
terraform apply      # actually does it (type "yes" when prompted)

init only needs to run once per project (or when you add new providers). plan and apply are your daily drivers.

6. Check your work

terraform show

Or just go look in the AWS console — your instance and bucket should be sitting there.

7. Clean up (seriously, do this)

terraform destroy

EC2 instances and S3 buckets cost money if left running. Don’t be the person who leaves a t2.micro running for six months and gets a surprise bill.

Quick tips before you go

  • Never commit .tfstate files to git — they can contain sensitive data.
  • Add a .gitignore with .terraform/, *.tfstate, *.tfstate.backup.
  • Run terraform fmt to auto-format your files so they don’t look like a mess.
  • If plan shows something you didn’t expect, stop and read it again before apply. Terraform does exactly what you tell it to, including deleting things.

That’s the whole loop: init → plan → apply → destroy. Everything else is just more resources.

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How to manage GoDaddy Domains in AWS Route53

Here is a quick guide to manage domain, whose registrar is Go Daddy in AWS using Route 53:

  1. Create a Hosted Zone in AWS Route 53
  • Log into your AWS Console
  • Navigate to Route 53 service
  • Click on “Hosted zones” in the left sidebar
  • Click “Create hosted zone”
  • Enter your domain name: example.org
  • Choose “Public hosted zone”
  • Click “Create hosted zone”
  1. Get the Name Servers from AWS
  • After creating the hosted zone, you’ll see a list of 4 name servers assigned to your domain
  • These will look something like:
    ns-1234.awsdns-12.org ns-567.awsdns-34.com ns-890.awsdns-56.net ns-1234.awsdns-78.co.uk
  • Keep this page open as you’ll need these name servers in the next step
  1. Update Name Servers in GoDaddy
  • Log into your GoDaddy account
  • SAVE ALL THE INFO FROM GODADDY – from DNS, NameServer, and other tabs as required.
  • Go to your Domain Settings for example.org
  • Look for “Nameservers” or “DNS” section
  • Choose “I’ll use my own nameservers” or “Custom nameservers”
  • Enter the 4 name servers you got from AWS Route 53
  • Save the changes
  1. Wait for DNS Propagation
  • DNS changes can take 24-48 hours to fully propagate
  • You can check the status using:
    • AWS Route 53 console (look for “Status” column)
    • Online DNS propagation checkers
    • dig or nslookup commands
  1. Verify DNS Transfer
  • In AWS Route 53, you can verify the transfer by:
    • Looking for “NS” records that match the name servers you set up
    • Using the “Test Record” feature in Route 53
    • Also check on https://www.whatsmydns.net/
  1. Set Up Required DNS Records
  • In AWS Route 53, create the following records:
    • A record for example.org pointing to your EC2 instance’s public IP
    • MX records for email routing
    • SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for email authentication
    • Any other required records for your services
  1. Best Practices
  • Keep a backup of your DNS records
  • Document all changes.
  • Set up DNS monitoring in AWS Route 53
  • Consider setting up DNS failover if needed
  • Use AWS Route 53’s health checks for your services
  1. Cost Considerations
  • AWS Route 53 charges:
    • $0.50 per hosted zone per month
    • $0.40 per million queries for the first billion queries
    • Additional costs for health checks and routing policies
  1. Security Considerations
  • Enable AWS CloudTrail to log all Route 53 API calls
  • Use IAM roles and policies to restrict access to Route 53
  • Consider enabling DNSSEC for additional security
  1. Monitoring and Maintenance
    • Set up CloudWatch alarms for DNS health
    • Regularly review DNS records
    • Keep track of DNS changes in your history.txt
    • Monitor DNS propagation times

Would you like me to provide more detailed information about any of these steps or help you with setting up specific DNS records for your email server?

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Finding All IP Addresses in Your AWS VPC with a Simple Bash Script

MORE Cursor magic!

When managing AWS infrastructure, it’s often crucial to have a clear overview of all IP addresses and endpoints within your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). With literally just one simple prompt, Cursor created a helpful bash script that provides a comprehensive view of all network-related resources in a VPC.

Continue reading “Finding All IP Addresses in Your AWS VPC with a Simple Bash Script” →
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AWS WordPress Deployment with CloudFront using Terraform

I couldn’t find an existing repo with a simple way to deploy a WordPress site on AWS with CloudFront CDN integration, so I created this Terraform script to do it: main-salman/aws-wordpress-cloudfront-terraform: A WordPress deployment on AWS fronted by CloudFront CDN deployed using Terraform.

This is great to test out CloudFront CDN integration with WordPress on AWS. Bunch of other scripts I found required owning a domain name and other inputs. This is just a simple script to get you started. Just simply run “terraform init” and “terraform apply” and you’re good to go!

Before running the script, the only three things you need to provide are:

  1. AWS Access Key
  2. AWS Secret Key
  3. Key Pair Name

All the other variables are optional and you can change them to your liking.

Continue reading “AWS WordPress Deployment with CloudFront using Terraform” →
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Tool for testing globally deployed databases in three different AWS regions

My team is building an application that needs to scale to 10,000s of users – but not millions. Accordingly, we can’t necessarily follow SaaS models/best practices meant for scaling to millions of users as that would be overkill and not cost efficient.

One architecture we came up with involves compute in one region with serverless RDS databases deployed in different regions due to data residency/compliance requirements. Of course, generally, you never want applications to be too far away from their databases – definitely not continents apart! But that’s part of our literal requirement.

So to test to make sure our application will be able to have adequate database performance even with databases deployed literally in other continents, I built the Global DB Performance Tester using Cursor AI

Continue reading “Tool for testing globally deployed databases in three different AWS regions” →
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Make a Web Application from scratch with CURSOR – no development experience needed!

My awesome friend Dipto Biswas introduced me to the world of AI development – and I am totally hooked!

Anyone can make web applications, and so much more, using AI, with no programming / development experience required! And you can actually make stuff that’s useful – not just basic “hello world” type beginer tutorials.

In this video, I make an app that can summarize a list of all AWS resources in a particular AWS account. You can make whatever you want using the same process. Make a 3D Pong game. Make an app that can remove background from images. Make an app that shows what the stars look like on a particular night based on latitude and longitude. Or whatever else your imagination thinks of! Here are the tools and accounts you need:

Cursor – The AI Code Editor

Vercel

GitHub

Install WSL | Microsoft Learn

Install Ubuntu on WSL2 – Ubuntu WSL documentation

How To Install Node.js on Ubuntu 20.04 | DigitalOcean (I referred to this part as NPM in the video)

Go nuts!

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Delete Buckets and List Resources based on tags

Here is an easy couple of sets of commands to list all resources with a certain tag and delete all buckets with a certain tag. Certain beats manually deleting buckets with lots of contents. I got these little snippets from this AWS Workshop: https://workshops.aws/card/unauthorized

List resources with a certain tag:

aws resourcegroupstaggingapi get-resources --tag-filters Key=MY_TAG_KEY,Values=MY_TAG_VALUE --query 'ResourceTagMappingList[].ResourceARN'

Delete buckets with a certain tag:

aws resourcegroupstaggingapi get-resources --tag-filters Key=MY_TAG_KEY,Values=MY_TAG_VALUE --query 'ResourceTagMappingList[].ResourceARN' > buckets.json

((for bucket in {0..1}; do cat buckets.json |jq -r ".[$bucket]";done) |cut -d":" -f 6) > buckets-to-delete

while read line; do aws s3 rb s3://$line --force; done < buckets-to-delete

rm buckets.json

rm buckets-to-delete
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Automatically tag EC2 instances with OS

I was surprised that a blog post doesn’t already exist (or at least I didn’t find one), so, this post covers how to automatically add a tag to EC2 instances upon creation with OS of the instance. After the below components are deployed, EC2 instances should automatically have either a os:linux or os:windows tag.

  1. First, create a Lambda function with the following code. I called my function autoTagEC2OS. Use Python 3.12:

Continue reading “Automatically tag EC2 instances with OS” →
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