In this guide, I will be hosting a fully functional ecommerce web application on AWS. This includes creating a secure VPC, setting up an EC2 instance, configuring an RDS database, and deploying a LAMP-based web server to host your application. By the end, you’ll have a scalable, cloud-hosted ecommerce solution.

Architecture

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Step 1: Create VPC

Start by creating a VPC to isolate your ecommerce environment with at least two availability zones for high availability.

• Navigate to the VPC console and select “VPC and More.”
• Configure your VPC with a CIDR block and subnets across multiple availability zones.
• Ensure that the necessary internet gateway and route tables are set up to allow connectivity.

Outcome: Your VPC should look like this:

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Step 2: Create EC2 Instance

1. Launch a new EC2 instance using the Amazon Linux AMI.
2. Create a new key pair for SSH access.

Create key pair

Edit Network Settings

• Edit the network settings to associate the EC2 instance with the VPC created earlier.
• Enable auto-assign public IP and configure security group rules to allow HTTP, HTTPS, and SSH access.

• Select the ecom vpc
• enable auto assign public IP

• Still under network add security group rules HTTP & HTTPS

Ensure that the security group has rules for:

- **HTTP**: Port 80
- **HTTPS**: Port 443
- **SSH**: Port 22

Connect to the EC2 Instance

• Use your key pair to SSH into the instance.
• Update the package cache using:

• Update apt cache

sudo apt update

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Step 3: Create MySQL RDS

• Launch a MySQL RDS instance.
• Configure the database with the following:

	database:

	name: ecom-database
	username: your-db-username
	password: your-db-password

Select the VPC

• Associate the RDS instance with the same VPC as the EC2 instance.
• Ensure that the EC2 instance is on a public subnet for RDS connectivity.

Connect the EC2 instance to RDS:

Use the EC2 instance to connect to the RDS database:

mysql -h your-rds-endpoint.us-east-2.rds.amazonaws.com -u your-db-username -p

If connection fails, ensure the EC2 security group allows inbound MySQL traffic on port 3306.

To connect to the RDS subnet this is necessary

• Go to your EC2 instance
  • click on Actions > Networking > connect RDS Database

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Step 4: Setup EC2 Web Server

Install LAMP Stack:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install lamp-server^

• Install MySQL Client

sudo apt install mysql-client

• Verified that apache is installed

cd /var/www/html

Clone the ecom site from GitHub

sudo git clone https://github.com/Jhoode/Electronix-Website.git

Update the connection file (connection.inc.php) with the RDS endpoint, username, and password.

cd Electronix-Website/ecom/

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Step 5: Setup Database

Connect to the database

mysql -h your-rds-endpoint.us-east-2.rds.amazonaws.com -u your-db-username -p

Note: if this does not connect you directly to the data base you need to go to the EC2 security group and add the mysql ports 3306 from anywhere.

Note: if you don’t see the database (ecom) just create a new

create database ecom;

use ecom
show tables;

Create tables

copy the ecom.sql from the git repo

Copy everything from line 30 to 353

Paste in the ecom database

show tables;

Exit the database

Update the following

• Database endpoint
• Database username
• Database password
• EC2 instance name
• EC2 public IP

Go to the Url:

3.145.170.165/Electronix-Website/ecom/

Note: go into the Apache config to point the server to the index file.

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Conclusion

You’ve successfully deployed a scalable ecommerce application on AWS using VPC, EC2, RDS, and a LAMP stack. This architecture is highly scalable and can be further enhanced with load balancers, caching layers, and auto-scaling groups for production readiness.

Tags: ecommerce AWS dynamodb vpc