Infrastructure automation

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most mature and comprehensive cloud computing platform available today, and as such it was a natural choice for BubbleCorp to host its infrastructure in.

If you haven't used AWS before, don't worry, we'll focus only on a few of its services:

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): A service that provides users with the ability to rent virtual computers in which to run their applications.

• Relational Database Service (RDS): This can be thought of as a specialized version of EC2 that provides managed database services.

• CloudFormation: With CloudFormation, users have the ability to specify infrastructure templates, called stacks, of several different AWS resources—such as EC2, AWS, and many others—as well as how they interact with each other. Once written, the infrastructure template can be sent to AWS to be executed.

For BubbleCorp, the idea was to write these infrastructure templates, which once submitted would result into a completely new, isolated...