AWS on DevLogs

I PASSED AWS DEVELOPER ASSOCIATE TODAY!!

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:23:33 +0530

TL;DR Link to heading

YEP! Today is the day after 2 months of grinding on SkillBuilder solving N number of Builder Labs / Digital Courses / Learning Plans I have enrolled and completed just to over-prepare for the Associate exam (more on this later) coz I was nervous 😅… I finally cleared AWS Certified Developer Associate examination today with a whopping score of 839.

Exam went really smooth, I encountered some tricky questions in the examination but most were just a read-through. Some questions were a bummer with very long context, then asked, “How would you debug microservices performance in production?”

Part 3.1: Setting up AWS infra for hosting a mail server

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 03:55:13 +0530

Note

This walkthrough is part of the Cloning Gmail’s Architecture series. For better context, I suggest you to start from Part 1

In this tutorial, we will look how we can deploy an EC2 instance, assign an Elastic IP (static public IP), enable port access for SMTP / IMAP communications and more, to configure the infrastructure for self-hosting a private email server.

Pre-Requisites Link to heading

Have an AWS Account and basic knowledge on how to setup an EC2 instance in AWS.
Know about mail protocols and how mail communication works.

If you have any other cloud provider as your preference feel free to jump to the Setting up the Mail Server

Part 2: What do you need to self-host an email server?

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:21:21 +0530

Selecting the Stack Link to heading

This series begins with replacing Gmail using a fully self-hosted mail system on AWS. The goal is not just email independence — it is learning real infrastructure, security, and operational ownership.

This post explains the selected stack, what alternatives were considered, and why these choices were made.

TL;DR - Final Stack Overview Link to heading

Hosting: Amazon EC2 (1-year Reserved Instance)
Mail Server: iRedMail
Mail Client: Mozilla Thunderbird
Domain Registrar: Namecheap
DNS Provider: Namecheap DNS

Keep reading if you want to know about the comparisons made in order to reach to these final verdicts.