This chapter is the culmination of a journey of learning Node.js application deployment. We developed an application existing solely on our laptop and added a number of useful features. With the goal of deploying that application on a public server to gain feedback, we worked on three types of deployment. In Chapter 10, Deploying Node.js Applications to Linux Servers, we learned how to launch persistent background tasks on Linux using PM2. In Chapter 11, Deploying Node.js Microservices with Docker, we learned how to dockerize the Notes application stack, and how to get it running with Docker.
In this chapter, we built on that and learned how to deploy our Docker containers on a Docker Swarm cluster. AWS is a powerful and comprehensive cloud hosting platform with a long list of possible services to use. We used EC2 instances in a VPC and the related infrastructure.
To facilitate this, we used Terraform, a popular tool for describing cloud deployments not just on AWS but on many...