Hands-On: Building a Three-Tier Web Architecture on AWS

This capstone lesson puts the pieces together in the order a real build follows, so the individual commands stop feeling arbitrary.

The sequence is: aws configure to authenticate → IAM users and roles for permissions → security groups for the firewall → EC2 for the application servers → S3 for static assets → CloudWatch for monitoring. Each step depends on the one before it.

In Try It, run aws logs describe-log-groups to look at the monitoring layer — the final piece, and the one that tells you whether everything else is healthy.

A common stumble is knowing each command but freezing on the order. Remember the flow — authenticate, permit, protect, run, store, watch — and the shape of any build becomes clear.

In real work, this whole sequence is written as infrastructure as code with Terraform or CloudFormation, so an entire environment can be rebuilt identically on demand.