Hello and welcome to the Getting Started with an AWS Solution, Real World Practices course from CloudAcademy. My name is Adam Hawkins and I'm your instructor for this lesson. This is the last lesson in the course. We have a simple objective here. We'll recap what we learned and I'll prepare you with your next steps. I'll recap the high level topics from the specific points we covered along the way.

You can go back and retake each lesson to revisit the reasoning behind each recommendation. The first thing we did was go through a simple pass, hold, adopt on all of the different key services to help you peg get the components for your stack. We also discussed six decision-making factors when evaluating these services, build versus buy, cost, automation, continuity, portability and development environment access.

Next we hit application security best practices, like private networking, security groups, using a bastion and white listing traffic. We also talked about all the different ways to secure things using IAM. Remember to give each person on your team an IAM user, use the white listing, enforce multi-factor authentication and use instance profiles exclusively inside of AWS. We also discussed preparing for an auto scaling application with CloudWatch. Remember to have an automated configuration system in place to handle new instances.

Also, CloudWatch is a great place to start, just remember to configure your alarms regardless of which tool you use. Finally we talked cost tracking with cost allocation tags and reducing costs with the mix of reserve capacity and spot incidences. These practices will get you pretty darn far in the beginning but they're not a silver bullet. Each AWS service has its own trade offs and other technical specifics you need to know before moving forward. CloudAcademy has you covered here. I recommend the following courses to bolster your skills.

First, Introduction to IAM, Developer Fundamentals for AWS, Governance on AWS, Advanced High Availability on AWS, and finally, Introduction to the AWS Web Application Firewall. I recommend you start getting your hands dirty and build prototypes, and test your assumptions before continuing. Nothing beats hands-on experience down in the trenches. Also remember to purchase a paid support plan. I cannot tell you how valuable this is. The developer support plan is something like $50 a month and ensures you have the help needed to debug errors and other misconfiguration issues. I cannot tell you how much time this has saved me. Also, odds are you'll have questions as well.

The CloudAcademy community forum is a great way to reach myself, your peers, and other experienced engineers. We're more than happy to answer your questions and help you out. Don't hesitate to reach me via email or Twitter if you prefer that. So, my friend, that's all I have for you. I wish you the best of luck building your application on AWS. Happy shipping.