AWS Fundamentals for PHP Developers

Also Known As

TL;DR

Explanation

Key AWS services for PHP: EC2 (virtual servers for PHP-FPM), Elastic Beanstalk / App Runner (PaaS for PHP), RDS (managed MySQL/PostgreSQL), S3 (file storage), SQS (job queues), ElastiCache (Redis/Memcached), CloudFront (CDN), Lambda + Bref (serverless PHP), IAM (identity — who can do what), Route 53 (DNS), ACM (free TLS certificates), Secrets Manager (credentials). The AWS Free Tier covers most of these for experimentation. The PHP AWS SDK (aws/aws-sdk-php) provides type-safe access to all services.

Diagram

flowchart TD
    subgraph Compute
        EC2[EC2 - Virtual servers]
        LAMBDA[Lambda - Functions]
        ECS[ECS - Containers]
    end
    subgraph Storage
        S3[S3 - Object storage<br/>files uploads assets]
        RDS[RDS - Managed DB<br/>MySQL PostgreSQL]
        ELASTICACHE[ElastiCache<br/>Redis Memcached]
    end
    subgraph Networking
        VPC[VPC - Private network]
        CF[CloudFront - CDN]
        ALB[ALB - Load balancer]
    end
    subgraph Messaging
        SQS[SQS - Job queue]
        SNS[SNS - Notifications]
    end
    ALB --> EC2 & ECS
    EC2 & ECS --> RDS & ELASTICACHE & S3 & SQS
style ALB fill:#d29922,color:#fff
style RDS fill:#6e40c9,color:#fff
style S3 fill:#238636,color:#fff

Common Misconception

Why It Matters

Common Mistakes

• Running PHP on EC2 without Auto Scaling — no ability to handle traffic spikes.
• Storing files on EC2 instance storage — lost when the instance is replaced; use S3.
• Using access keys instead of IAM roles for EC2 — roles rotate automatically; hardcoded keys are a security risk.
• Not enabling RDS automated backups — default retention is 1 day; configure 7-35 days.

Code Examples

// Hardcoded AWS credentials — never do this:
$s3 = new Aws\S3\S3Client([
    'version' => 'latest',
    'region'  => 'eu-west-1',
    'credentials' => [
        'key'    => 'AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE',   // In source code!
        'secret' => 'wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG', // Committed to git!
    ],
]);

// IAM role on EC2 — credentials auto-rotated, never in code:
$s3 = new Aws\S3\S3Client([
    'version' => 'latest',
    'region'  => 'eu-west-1',
    // No credentials key — SDK picks up IAM role from instance metadata
]);

// Or environment variables injected at runtime:
$s3 = new Aws\S3\S3Client([
    'version'     => 'latest',
    'region'      => getenv('AWS_REGION'),
    'credentials' => Aws\Credentials\CredentialProvider::env(),
]);

References

• ↗ https://aws.amazon.com/free/
• ↗ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-php/

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