Cloud resources, scaling, and cost.

The lab used three EC2 instances: one for the application interface and two larger machines for testing. Creating them made the basic value of cloud infrastructure easy to see. Compute can be provisioned quickly, sized for a specific workload, and changed without buying physical hardware first.

Different jobs need different resources

The testing machines required more compute than the interface machine. That sounds obvious, but seeing the instance types beside their prices connected architecture to operations. Oversizing every machine wastes money; undersizing a critical workload creates performance and reliability problems.

Billing is part of the technical system

The billing view was one of the most useful parts of the lab. Expensive testing instances should not continue running when no one needs them, and stopping compute does not remove every possible charge because storage and other attached services can remain. A responsible design includes ownership, budgets, alerts, and a plan for shutting resources down.

Why this matters for solutions work

A solutions engineer needs to explain more than how to launch a resource. The better conversation connects capacity, availability, security, and cost to what the customer is actually trying to accomplish. This lab was a small first step toward making that tradeoff concrete.