Aws on SQP Dev

First Real Cloud Deployment

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Docker Basics — Building and Deploying to EC2

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Docker packages an application and everything it needs into a container. Same image, identical behaviour on any machine. This post covers building a custom nginx image and deploying it to AWS EC2.

Podman on Fedora

Docker doesn’t run inside a Toolbox container — kernel module restrictions. Podman is Docker-compatible and works natively on Fedora:

echo 'alias docker=podman' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Same commands, no workarounds needed from this point.

Building a Custom Image

docker-nginx/
├── Dockerfile
└── index.html

FROM docker.io/library/nginx:latest
COPY index.html /usr/share/nginx/html/
EXPOSE 80

docker build -t my-nginx:v1.0 .
docker run -d -p 8080:80 --name my-nginx my-nginx:v1.0

Open http://localhost:8080 — custom HTML served via nginx inside a container.

Automating Terraform with GitHub Actions

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Manually running terraform apply from a laptop works for learning. In the real world, infrastructure changes go through a pipeline. This is how I set one up.

The Goal

Every Pull Request → run terraform plan automatically
Every merge to main → run terraform apply automatically
AWS credentials stored securely as GitHub Secrets — never in code

Workflow File

name: Terraform CI/CD

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  terraform:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    defaults:
      run:
        working-directory: exercise-02-variables-outputs

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: hashicorp/setup-terraform@v2
      - uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v2
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
          aws-region: eu-west-2

      - run: terraform init
      - run: terraform fmt -check
      - run: terraform validate
      - run: terraform plan
        if: github.event_name == 'pull_request'
      - run: terraform apply -auto-approve
        if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' && github.event_name == 'push'

Problems I Hit

Workflow not showing in Actions tab — GitHub only reads workflow files from the main branch. The file needs to be merged before it’s recognised.

First Terraform Deployment on AWS

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With the environment set up, I wrote my first real Terraform code — a complete VPC with a public subnet, security group, and an EC2 instance running nginx.

What I Built

VPC (10.0.0.0/16)
Public subnet with Internet Gateway
Security group (SSH + HTTP)
EC2 instance (Ubuntu 24.04)
SSH key pair

File Structure

exercise-02-variables-outputs/
├── main.tf
├── variables.tf
├── locals.tf
├── outputs.tf
├── data.tf
├── key.tf
└── terraform.tfvars

Separating resources into logical files keeps things clean and readable.