Building a Three-Tier Bookstore App on AWS from Scratch: Infrastructure, Deployment, and Every Debug Along the Way

Building a Three-Tier Bookstore App on AWS from Scratch: Infrastructure, Deployment, and Every Debug Along the Way By Vivian Chiamaka Okose Tags: #aws #terraform #rds #nodejs #devops #threetier #mysql #nginx #cloud #iac I recently completed a project that I would describe as the most satisfying and the most frustrating thing I have built so far in my DevOps journey -- in equal measure. The goal was to deploy The EpicBook, a full-stack bookstore application, on AWS using Terraform. Not just spin up a VM and call it done. A proper three-tier architecture: network layer, compute layer, and a managed database layer, all defined as infrastructure as code, all connected through deliberate security boundaries. This is the story of how I built it, what broke along the way, and what I now understand about cloud architecture that I did not before. The Architecture Before writing a single line of code, I mapped out what needed to exist: Network tier: A custom VPC with a public subnet for the EC2