Chapter 2: Deploying Metabase with AWS

Now that we have learned the simple way to deploy Metabase to the cloud, this chapter will focus on the official paved path for users who want to self-host. This path involves using Amazon Web Services, or AWS as I'll be referring to it going forward. For software, AWS can do just about everything – it is massively complex, and explaining it thoroughly would fill entire libraries. A full explanation of all AWS can offer is far beyond the scope of this book, and as such, this chapter's goal is to explain only the relevant parts of AWS in a gentle but thorough manner.

Readers with backgrounds in technical operations or experience with AWS may skip some of the sections in this chapter. However, many people interested in using Metabase have backgrounds in analytics but know very little about software development operations. For users such as these, this chapter will be extremely useful as I will gently but comprehensively explain the services and terminology to run Metabase on AWS in a scalable way using best practices.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• Introduction to Amazon Web Services
• Signing up for a free trial of AWS
• Metabase on Elastic Beanstalk
• Using best practices for Metabase on AWS
• Creating an IAM user
• Creating a Virtual Private Cloud
• Creating the Metabase application
• Monitoring costs on AWS