On Thursday, April 26th, 2023, we organized an event titled “Creating Applications on the Cloud from Scratch” at Startit Center in Novi Sad. The event was attended by over 120 participants, including developers, DevOps engineers, students, and IT enthusiasts, who gathered to learn the step-by-step process of building and deploying a modern cloud application.

The session was led by our colleague Zoran Stupar, Head of DevOps at CYBERLAB, with extensive experience implementing DevOps principles in global companies such as Sprinting Software, QACube and Alithya.

With years of hands-on work on projects built on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, Zoran guided the audience through real-world examples from local development setups to fully automated cloud infrastructure.

Zoran demonstrated what it takes to build a modern cloud application from the first line of code to production deployment. Using a real-world project as a case study, he walked through key steps, including:

• Setting up a local development environment with Docker Compose and Nginx
• Automating build and deployment pipelines with GitHub Actions
• Defining infrastructure using Terraform and Terragrunt
• Implementing core AWS services such as ECS (Fargate), RDS (PostgreSQL), S3, CloudFront, Lambda, Cognito, OpenSearch, and Route53

The audience saw how good architecture and automation can enable scalable, secure, and maintainable systems, without unnecessary manual steps.

Zoran highlighted how Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has transformed the way teams manage environments and explained why Terragrunt has become an industry standard. Particular interest was sparked by the segment on CYBERLAB’s OpenSearch Terraform module, available on the Terraform Registry, which provides efficient log management and notification handling within AWS environments.

In addition to infrastructure, Zoran also presented the frontend and backend stacks based on TypeScript, React, Express, and TypeORM, offering attendees a complete picture of end-to-end cloud application development.

As is often the case in real-world projects, this one came with its own set of challenges. Zoran openly shared lessons learned, from issues with OpenSearch logs and API Gateway configurations to DNS setups in AWS.

Each challenge served as a valuable example of how to approach problems methodically, systematically, and with an engineering mindset, without panic.

To wrap up the session, attendees received a curated list of recommended resources, including:

• Microservice patterns
• Docker best practices and tools
• Amazon ECS Workshop
• AWS best practices
• Terraform and Terragrunt resources
• GitHub Actions resources
• OpenSearch module
• CYBERLAB blog

After the presentation, participants had the chance to chat with Zoran and the CYBERLAB team, ask additional questions, and share their own experiences during a relaxed networking session.

The event “Creating Applications on the Cloud from Scratch” showcased the local IT community’s enthusiasm for learning, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. Events like this remind us that knowledge is the most powerful tool and that sharing it is what makes our tech community stronger. See you at the next CYBERLAB meetup!

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