Prior to work on this company I was able to get four AWS certifications and also participating in a few projects that required knowledge in AWS, but nothing compared with what I was able to achieve during this time.

You might be thinking how I end up collaborating with architecture and infrastructure if I was originally hired to fill a position as a backend engineer, the truth is that I was extremely lucky, there were some managerial changes in the company and after a few months of starting my journey here, a new CTO was introduced to the team, we also were a pretty small team and always needed an extra pair of hands.

Late in 2023, AWS informed our Aurora servers needed to be migrated due to the deprecation of the MySQL Community major version 5.7 and it was recommended to migrate to major version 8.0.

[!cite] AWS Announcement

[!note] Check how companies are not aware of this costs and how this could be impacting your billing: AWS Billing spike due to RDS Extended Support

That day during our stand up the Scrum Master and the CTO assigned to me the task to evaluate the impact of this notification and inmediately I raise my concern about the costs the company will have to pay if we meet the deadline. In the beginning this didn’t see like too much - $0.1 per VCPU -, and I decided to invest that day in putting together all the numbers to make sure we all understand the impact of this notification.

The least privilege is a term coined in IT Security that stablishs a user or an entity should only have access to specific resources or data to complete with their tasks. This means instead of creating several super users or only one super user and sharing the credentials, we should be focus en creating granular access for every user or application.

[!note] The Principle of Least Privilege is consider a fundamental best practice.

The docker network is isolated from the outside by default, when we want to connect from outside to a docker container we use/create a port mapping and this get exposed through localhost, 127.0.0.1 or your IP address.

[!note] 127.0.0.1 is a loopback address that the system uses to communicate to itself, there is a DNS auto resolved name called localhost that points to 127.0.0.1.

In this example we are going to configure a Web Server and a MySQL database.

You might be wondering why your AWS expenses for RDS shoot up in the last few months or maybe you already know this is caused by the Amazon RDS Extended Support for Aurora and want to migrate your engine version, if so this post is for you.

Late in 2023, AWS informed Aurora users to migrate the version of the Aurora engines due to the deprecation of the MySQL Community major version 5.7 and it was recommended to migrate to major version 8.0.