Creating a simple Hello World web application

Now that we are connected to our EC2 instance, we are ready to start playing around with it. In this book, we will focus on the most common use case for AWS in tech companies: hosting an application. In terms of languages, we will use JavaScript, which is one of the most popular languages on GitHub. That said, this application is  aimed more at giving support in order to demonstrate how to best use AWS using the DevOps principles. Having any kind of knowledge about JavaScript isn't required in order to understand this book:

Some of the main advantages that JavaScript offers with regards to this book include the fact that:

  • It is fairly easy to write and read, even for beginners
  • It doesn't need to be compiled
  • It can be run server side thanks to Node.js (https://nodejs.org)
  • It is officially supported by AWS and therefore the AWS SDK for JavaScript is a first-class citizen

For the rest of the chapter, all the commands and code are to be run on our instance through SSH.