The Beginning: Why AWS?
As an ICTS student, I wanted to understand the "behind the scenes" of cloud infrastructure. I moved my portfolio from a local machine to AWS to experience real-world cloud security concepts firsthand.
Mistakes & Roadblocks (The Hard Way)
Learning isn't linear. Here are the walls I hit and how I climbed over them during the deployment.
The Connection Failure: I initially couldn't SSH into my server.
The Fix: I realized I hadn't opened Port 22 in my Security Group firewall rules.
The Permission Denied: My private key (.pem) was "too open" for Windows.
The Fix: Using PowerShell and the
icacls command to restrict file permissions strictly to my user.
The Silent Web: Apache was installed, but the IP showed an error site.
The Fix: I forgot that Linux services don't always start automatically;
systemctl start httpd fixed it.
Key Takeaways
- **Network Isolation**: Learned how to isolate resources using a custom VPC structure.
- **Firewall Management**: Security Groups act as a crucial first-line firewall for controlling traffic.
- **Access Control**: Never underestimate file permissions; they are fundamental to OS security.
The Final Result
A fully functional, hardened Linux server running on a t3.micro instance, serving this very portfolio via a secure infrastructure.