The first time I deployed a Next.js app to production, it took me three days. Not because the app was complicated — it was a straightforward portfolio site. It took three days because I had no idea what I was doing with AWS, I'd never written a GitHub Actions workflow, and every tutorial I found either skipped the hard parts or assumed I already knew them.
By the time I was done, I had a deployment pipeline I was genuinely proud of: push to main, GitHub Actions runs the build, tests pass, the app deploys to an EC2 instance behind CloudFront. Zero manual steps. Zero downtime deploys. Total cost: about $5/month.
This guide is the one I wish had existed. We're going to deploy a Next.js app to AWS from scratch — EC2 for compute, CloudFront for CDN, GitHub Actions for CI/CD — with every step explained so you understand what you're building, not just copying commands.
Why AWS Instead of Vercel?
This is a fair question. Vercel is genuinely excellent for Next.js, and for most projects it's the right call. You push, it deploys. Done.
