AWS Orientation For PHP Applications

AWS provides broad infrastructure and managed services across virtual machines, containers, serverless, databases, storage, networking, identity, and observability.

Why This Matters

The breadth supports many scales and compliance needs but increases service-selection, IAM, networking, cost, and operational complexity.

Working Model

Common PHP choices include Lightsail or EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, App Runner, ECS with Fargate, Lambda for compatible functions, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, load balancing, CloudFront, IAM, and CloudWatch.

Practical Rules

  • Choose the simplest compute model that fits.
  • Design IAM with least privilege.
  • Use managed databases and object storage deliberately.
  • Understand region and availability-zone boundaries.
  • Tag and budget resources.

Failure Modes

  • Starting with Kubernetes without a need.
  • Using broad IAM policies.
  • Ignoring NAT and data-transfer costs.
  • Assuming Lambda behaves like a persistent PHP-FPM process.

Verification

  • Deploy from automation.
  • Test multi-zone failure assumptions.
  • Restore RDS backups.
  • Trace one request through logs and metrics.

Official References

What You Should Be Able To Do

After this lesson, you should be able to explain major AWS compute and supporting service choices for PHP without turning the lesson into a console walkthrough, choose a suitable approach for a real PHP project, and verify the result instead of relying on assumptions.

Practice

Practice: Choose AWS Compute

Compare Lightsail, EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, App Runner, ECS/Fargate, and Lambda.

Your answer must:

  • state the intended outcome;
  • show the commands, data flow, or implementation shape;
  • identify at least one unsafe alternative;
  • explain how the result will be verified.
Show solution

Choose based on server control, container fit, scaling, request model, background work, operational skill, and integration needs rather than service popularity.

The important part is not memorising one command or vendor screen. The solution makes the invariant, failure behavior, and verification evidence explicit.

Practice: Design Least Privilege

A PHP app needs one S3 prefix and one queue.

Your answer must:

  • state the intended outcome;
  • show the commands, data flow, or implementation shape;
  • identify at least one unsafe alternative;
  • explain how the result will be verified.
Show solution

Grant only required actions on named resources to the runtime role, separate deployment permissions, avoid embedded long-lived keys, and audit denied and allowed calls.

The important part is not memorising one command or vendor screen. The solution makes the invariant, failure behavior, and verification evidence explicit.

Practice: Review AWS Cost Drivers

Identify costs beyond compute.

Your answer must:

  • state the intended outcome;
  • show the commands, data flow, or implementation shape;
  • identify at least one unsafe alternative;
  • explain how the result will be verified.
Show solution

Include RDS, cache, load balancers, NAT gateways, storage requests, logs, backups, egress, cross-zone traffic, support, and idle staging.

The important part is not memorising one command or vendor screen. The solution makes the invariant, failure behavior, and verification evidence explicit.