Ten years ago the Amazon Web Services platform was launched and in that time it has dominated and shaped the way cloud computing is viewed. Even after a decade there are still a lot of buzzwords flying around and putting your app in the cloud is often sold as a simple, cure-all solution. So what's really involved? This talk will give you a hands-on walkthrough of building a PHP application stack in AWS. We will cover the basic design principles needed to create a scalable and distributed platform, compare the AWS components with their "roll your own" counterparts, examine how to structure and build our machine images. With an application up and running, we'll follow that through with monitoring a running fleet, configuring the AWS autoscaling functionality, and deploying updates to an arbitrary set of instances. This is not a theoretical, text-book talk - this is real-life configuration with the cool concepts and tricky hacks that involves.