(Re)Starting Devops

A while back, I had started my DevOps journey with great enthusiasm. But like many of us, life threw in other commitments, and I had to pause that path midway.

Fast forward to today — I’m finally restarting, and the excitement feels fresh again. This time, I’m more determined to be consistent and share my learnings along the way. Today marked Day 2 of my journey, and it was quite an insightful one.

Learning About EC2

I began the day by diving deeper into Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).

EC2 is essentially a virtual server in the cloud where you can host and run your applications. What stood out to me:

• You get full control of the server.

• You can choose your OS (I went with Ubuntu).

• It scales based on demand.

• And yes, it’s pay-as-you-go, which makes it beginner-friendly.

Deploying a Next.js App on EC2

Next up was deployment. I wanted to get a simple Next.js app running on my instance. Here’s what I did:

1. SSH into the EC2 instance

    ssh -i "my-key.pem" ubuntu@<ec2-public-ip>
   

2. Installed Node using NVM
   I didn’t want to mess with versions, so NVM made life easier.

    curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh | bash
    source ~/.bashrc
    nvm install 18
   

3. Pulled in my Next.js project

    git clone <your-repo-url>
    cd project
    npm install
    npm run build
   

4. Kept it running with PM2

    npm install -g pm2
    pm2 start npm --name "next-app" -- run start
    pm2 save
    pm2 startup
   

   At this point, my app was running on port 3000 inside the server. But of course, no one’s going to type <ip>:3000 forever. That’s where Nginx came in.

Setting Up Nginx Reverse Proxy

I installed Nginx and used it as a reverse proxy so that my app runs directly on port 80 (normal HTTP).

1. Installed Nginx

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install nginx
   

2. Configured reverse proxy

   Edited the config:

    server {
        listen 80;
        server_name <your-ec2-ip-or-domain>;
   
        location / {
            proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
            proxy_http_version 1.1;
            proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
            proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
        }
    }
   

3. Restarted Nginx

    sudo systemctl restart nginx
   

   Boom 💥 — app was live on EC2, no port nonsense.

My Takeaways from Day 2

• EC2 is simple to get started with, but powerful enough to host almost anything.

• NVM saved me from Node version hell.

• PM2 is a lifesaver — no need to keep a terminal open to run my app.

• Nginx felt magical once the reverse proxy worked.