Hands-on Project Experience in Building Scalable AWS Architectures

Mason Romney is a certified AWS Cloud Practitioner with a strong foundation in cloud infrastructure and practical experience designing and deploying secure, scalable, and highly available solutions using Amazon Web Services. Mason has demonstrated a clear understanding of real-world AWS architectures by successfully delivering a comprehensive cloud infrastructure project modeled after enterprise-level environments.

As part of this project, Mason built a fault-tolerant, scalable, and secure web application infrastructure from the ground up, utilizing a wide range of AWS services. His implementation was based on cloud architecture best practices, with a strong emphasis on high availability, security, automation, and performance optimization.

Key Highlights of the Project:

  • Identity and Access Management (IAM):
    Mason applied least-privilege access principles by creating IAM roles, users, and custom policies to manage secure access to AWS resources. He also integrated service roles and enforced role-based access across compute and storage components.

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC):
    Designed a fully customized VPC with both public and private subnets across multiple Availability Zones, using Route Tables, Internet Gateways, and NAT Gateways to control traffic flow. He also configured Network ACLs (NACLs) and Security Groups for an additional layer of security at both subnet and instance levels.

  • Compute & Auto Scaling:
    Launched and configured EC2 instances for web servers and application servers. Integrated Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) to ensure seamless scalability based on traffic demand, and paired them with Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to distribute incoming traffic efficiently and improve application availability.

  • Storage and Static Hosting with Amazon S3:
    Created S3 buckets for static content hosting and enabled static website hosting. Applied bucket policies to control access and secure content, and implemented versioning and lifecycle rules to manage storage cost-effectively.

  • Database Layer using Amazon RDS:
    Provisioned an Amazon RDS instance with multi-AZ deployment for high availability. Secured the database by deploying it in private subnets, using parameter groups, option groups, and enforcing encryption at rest.

  • Content Delivery and Performance Optimization:
    Integrated Amazon CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute static and dynamic content globally with low latency. Connected it with S3 buckets and EC2-hosted content to boost performance and improve user experience.

  • DNS Management with Amazon Route 53:
    Configured Route 53 for domain registration, routing policies, and health checks. Implemented failover routing to improve reliability and availability in case of infrastructure failures.

  • Security Best Practices:
    Applied best practices throughout the architecture, including the use of IAM policies, S3 bucket policies, VPC flow logs, and CloudWatch metrics to monitor, log, and troubleshoot performance and security-related issues.

Through this project, Mason not only demonstrated technical expertise in a broad range of AWS services but also showed his ability to think strategically about architecture, scalability, and security. His proactive mindset, attention to detail, and hands-on skills make him a strong candidate for roles focused on cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and systems engineering.

Mason is now ready to bring his knowledge and practical experience into a professional setting, contributing to teams looking to build and maintain resilient cloud-based systems.