Note: I’m going to use AWS services as most of my examples for this post, but that’s just because I’m most familiar with them, the patterns found below are not limited to just AWS and can be applied to any cloud provider or self-hosted where similar patterns exist.
Introduction Every service has some amount of supporting infrastructure required to support it. This includes any virtual servers (EC2 or other), storage (ex.Docker containers are the latest craze taking the world by storm. They enable software vendors to have more control over how their software is executed reducing the amount of work that software hosters need to be responsible for. By shifting the burden of figuring out environment requirements on to the software vendor, certain critical decisions that help improve security can be made once and only once and distributed to end-users. This reduces the cost barrier of having more stable/secure software as users no-longer have to think about intricacies of security and management, which we can see that users rarely take the time to invest in.Disclaimer: At the time of this article’s writing, I work at Amazon, but not in AWS. This article is based on my own research and ideas and is not the official position of Amazon. This article is not intended as marketing material for AWS, only as some architectural patterns for you to use if you do leverage AWS.
AWS provides a number of different resources that you can use to build services using, including S3 buckets, SQS queues, etc.Update from 2023: I have long since stopped using this mechanism for
Setting up new hosts entries for every different web site that you develop is hard. This workflow allows you to completely automate it. First thing you’ll want to do is setup a wildcard DNS record that points to your host. This allows you to dynamically setup new development websites without having create new DNS records for each one of them.