First Real Cloud Deployment

Today I deployed my first real full-stack application to AWS EC2.

The project is a hospital staff allocation system built with:

• React + Vite frontend
• Express backend
• PostgreSQL database
• Docker containers
• Docker Compose orchestration

What I Learned

The most important thing was understanding how the different layers connect together.

Final architecture:

Browser
   ↓ HTTPS
DuckDNS
   ↓
Caddy reverse proxy
   ↓
Docker app container
   ↓
PostgreSQL container

Deployment Workflow

The workflow looked like this:

Local Fedora machine
   ↓
Build container image with Podman
   ↓
Push image to private Docker Hub repository
   ↓
EC2 pulls image
   ↓
Docker Compose starts containers
   ↓
Caddy provides HTTPS

Biggest Learning Moments

I hit several real infrastructure problems during deployment:

• Docker socket permission issues
• Private Docker Hub authentication
• PostgreSQL password mismatches
• Database startup timing issues
• Reverse proxy configuration
• HTTPS setup

At first it felt chaotic, but debugging those issues taught me much more than simply following a tutorial.

Important Realization

Infrastructure work is less about memorizing commands and more about understanding:

• which component is responsible
• where traffic flows
• how services communicate
• where state is stored
• how containers interact

Final Result

The application now runs publicly with HTTPS:

https://dsuopd.duckdns.org

with:

• automatic HTTPS certificates
• persistent PostgreSQL storage
• isolated containers
• cloud deployment
• reverse proxy architecture

This was probably the first time the concepts behind Docker, reverse proxies and deployment started feeling real instead of abstract.