Most AWS architecture guides assume you have a DevOps team and a large budget. This guide is for small engineering teams who need to run production workloads reliably without burning money on over-engineered infrastructure.
Start Simple, Scale Intentionally
The biggest mistake I see small teams make is copying enterprise architecture patterns before they have enterprise-scale problems.
For a typical early-stage product, this is enough:
├── VPC (single region, 2 AZs)
│ ├── Public Subnets
│ │ └── ALB (Application Load Balancer)
│ └── Private Subnets
│ ├── EC2 Auto Scaling Group
│ └── RDS PostgreSQL (Multi-AZ when ready)
├── S3 (static assets, backups)
├── CloudFront (CDN for static assets)
└── Route 53 (DNS)
IAM: The Foundation You Can't Skip
Proper IAM from day one saves enormous pain later. Never use root credentials. Create per-service IAM roles with least privilege.
Cost Optimization Without Sacrificing Reliability
On a t3.nano or t3.micro: configure swap space, limit Node.js heap, use PM2 cluster mode judiciously, and monitor memory with CloudWatch custom metrics.
The key insight: monitoring is not optional, it's how you sleep at night.
