The frontend layer

With the subnets in place, we can start thinking about our VPC inhabitants.

The frontend or application layer consists of our Auto Scaling Groups and the first decision that we'll face would be that of an EC2 instance type.

The profile of the frontend application would very much dictate the choice between a memory, compute or a storage optimized instance. With some help from fellow developers (in the case of an in-house application) and a suitable performance testing tool (or service) you should be able to ascertain which system resource does the given application make most use of.

Let us assume we have picked the C4 Compute Optimized instance class which AWS suggests for webservers. The next question will be - what size?

Well, one way to guess our way through, is to take the average number of requests per second that we would like to be able to support, deploy the minimum number of instances we can afford (two for resilience) of the smallest size available in the chosen...