hi guys, I wonder if you can help me, I've been asked by my Line Manager to liase with an app building firm that is going to make an Angular APP and host it on AWS (Amazon Web Services). I've never used AWS before and have no idea what to expect for pricing.

The APP will be educational, questions, answers and resources like slides, text and video etc and available to 400 pupils over 5 schools in place of regular workbooks that they currently use but are unable to due to covid-19.

So that's 2000 pupils all told. What AWS services should I use and what is a fair bill I can expect from them in the UK. The boss is insistent that we have our own AWS account and self host the app when it's done.

I have no experience of this at all so any help will be appreciated. Cheers everyone in advance!

Also the AWS website is a confusing mess and their chat options are not working at the time of posting this lol.

So many ways to do one thing in AWS these days.

The "classic" approach is to grab an EC2 instance to run your app (frontend & backend), load everything you need on that, use S3 for file storage, and away you go (maybe with some cloudfront / route53 config facing it, but that's just decoration per-se.) Don't forget you'll need to maintain that EC2 instance yourself, but this is likely the easiest if you're getting started.

The "modern" approach is generally to spec out an EKS instance and use K8s with their ECS / Fargate service, using one of their storage services (RDS, Dynamo, etc.) for persistence. But that's almost certainly going to work out more expensive and complicated. Advantages are no need to maintain EC2 instances, and K8s brings easy redundancy, auto-scaling, update management and trivial horizontal scaling. That's the "gold standard" I generally look to for spinning up something in AWS these days.

There's many other options of course - you could go elastic beanstalk, you could go lambda (aka "serverless"), you could probably go with a hundred other more esoteric services that I know nothing about. But the above two are the main ones I generally recommend.

Pricing is pretty transparent for all services, but how much it costs can vary from "almost nothing" to "thousands a month" depending on how big an instance you choose, how many instances you choose, how much traffic you have, etc. Best thing is to put some numbers together on the above for different scenarios (peak traffic, low traffic, normal traffic etc.), look up the prices and then work out costs from that.

@AlmondSauce
I'd skip eks for a single service. That's a bit of an optimization. ECS will get them halfway there and give them options. I wouldn't tap lambda for much other than glue code.

Thanks everyone for all of the help, it's much appreciated I'm studying their plans now lol.

Once again thanks to all for helping out.