Skip to content

About

This is the one architecture diagram most DevOps engineers keep in their head. If you truly understand this, 80% of AWS architectures become obvious.

Resources

Stars

0 stars

Watchers

0 watching

Forks

Latest commit

 

History

5 Commits

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date
 
 

Repository files navigation

Here’s a clean GitHub-ready aws-architecture-flow.md Markdown file based on your content. You can paste this directly into a repo.

AWS Web Architecture – Step-by-Step Flow

image

1. User enters domain

The request starts with DNS handled by Amazon Route 53.

Example:

example.com → ALB

Route53 resolves the domain name to the Application Load Balancer (ALB) address.


2. Internet traffic enters AWS

Traffic reaches the VPC through the Internet Gateway attached to the Amazon VPC.

Inside the VPC we typically separate resources into:

  • Public Subnet
  • Private Subnet

3. Public subnet layer

Public subnets contain internet-facing components such as:

  • Application Load Balancer (ALB)
  • NAT Gateway

Example route table for a public subnet:

0.0.0.0/0 → Internet Gateway

This allows resources in the subnet to communicate with the internet.


4. Load balancer distributes traffic

The load balancer sends traffic to backend servers running on Amazon EC2.

Example request flow:

User request ↓ ALB ↓ EC2 instance 1 EC2 instance 2 EC2 instance 3

This improves:

  • Availability
  • Scalability
  • Fault tolerance

5. Private subnet (application layer)

Application servers are usually placed in private subnets.

Reason:

Security

These servers should not be reachable from the internet directly.

Traffic flow:

ALB → EC2


6. Database layer

The database (often Amazon RDS) sits in private subnets as well.

Example security rule:

RDS inbound: Port 3306 from EC2 security group

This ensures the database cannot be accessed directly from the internet.


7. Private servers accessing the internet

Private servers still need to:

  • Download updates
  • Install packages
  • Call external APIs

They use a NAT Gateway for outbound access:

EC2 → NAT Gateway → Internet

NAT allows outbound traffic only, blocking inbound connections from the internet.


Final Architecture Flow

User ↓ Route53 ↓ Internet ↓ ALB (public subnet) ↓ EC2 Auto Scaling (private subnet) ↓ RDS database


Key Design Principle

Production systems typically follow three layers:

Edge layer → Load Balancer Application layer → EC2 Data layer → Database

Each layer is isolated and secured.


Layered Security Model

Security in AWS is implemented in multiple layers:

NACL ↓ Security Groups ↓ Application Firewall

This defense-in-depth strategy protects the infrastructure from multiple attack vectors.


Summary

A typical secure AWS architecture includes:

  • VPC network isolation
  • Public and private subnets
  • Load balancing
  • Auto scaling compute
  • Secure database access
  • Controlled outbound internet via NAT

This design provides:

  • High availability
  • Scalability
  • Security

About

This is the one architecture diagram most DevOps engineers keep in their head. If you truly understand this, 80% of AWS architectures become obvious.

Resources

Stars

0 stars

Watchers

0 watching

Forks

Releases

Packages

Contributors