Personal Computer to AWS

A user-side toolkit for moving heavy work onto AWS: plan the architecture, launch EC2 instances, and browse S3 from the terminal
Shell
AWS
Mermaid
Target Audience: People who run heavy jobs from a PC and want the most efficient AWS setup that will do it
Value Proposition: Planning and execution of the least viable AWS architecture for an offloaded task from your PC to the cloud
Product Link: Not applicable
Demonstration Link: Blog post coming soon!
Source Repository: github.com/ammaraldawood/aws


Technology Stack

  • Programming Languages:
    • Shell: Zsh scripts for planning and launching.


  • Core Technologies:
    • Rclone: Browses the remote S3 bucket from the terminal.
    • AWS CLI: Account access, Session Manager, and instance launch.
    • Mermaid: Architecture diagrams rendered from the plan.
    • Chafa: Viewing approximations of images inside the terminal emulator.

Project Learnings/Skills

  1. Architecture selection: Turn a workload description into a small set of AWS services, then draw only the services and setup steps that were chosen.

  2. Plan handoff: Keep the recommendation and the launch in separate scripts, with one file between them, so a non-EC2 plan stops instead of launching the wrong thing.

  3. LLM prompting and HITL: The repo is mostly written by LLMs, which required a lot of back and forth with them to get them to understand what I want and how I want it to look like.