The Cloud: Our Final Frontier

What to expect in this chapter?

We have already seen how to deploy to a local Swarm cluster, albeit with only a single node. In this chapter, we take this a step further and create infrastructure running in the cloud. We will create a cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS). By the end of this chapter, we will have our application deployed and running in AWS.

Although our cloud deployment won’t be production-grade, you will have gained some valuable experience and will have started to get a feel for some of the real-world considerations at play. Note that, as the cloud services we use in this chapter aren’t free, some (small) costs are associated with running the application. However, assuming you are diligent and clean up or stop the resources when we are done, the costs will be negligible—measured in pennies.

In this chapter, we are going to see what it would take to deploy our app to a cloud provider, AWS. Here are the steps:

AWS account

Sign up for an AWS account at https://aws.amazon.com/ if you do not already have one.

AWS keys

Once you have created an account, you will need to generate an access key ID and a secret key ID so that you can set up infrastructure from the command line. After logging into the AWS console, select IAM and you will see a page similar to what’s shown below. In the left-hand IAM menu, select Users (highlighted).