I have never used Ethereum before but will use Ubuntu or AWS AMI to install it and sync the blockchain.
After that I want to generate addresses and populate those addresses in a MySQL database which will be linked to an ecommerce site for customers to use at checkout.
I have successfully achieved this process with Bitcoin and now want to do it with Ethereum.
I do not want anything to do with ETH contracts, I just want a new addresses to be displayed when the customer reaches checkout.
Any advice will be appreciated.
Easier what you can do if you will be just requesting payments is to use BIP39. What it does is that you will have a sequence from which you should be able to easily generate new addresses without the need of your private keys, there are libraries for this. So at the end of the day you will use some API like from etherscan and see the balance and you don't put private keys on your server and thus you don't expose them at all, even you won't need to have blockchain synced.
But if you still want to have full blockchain and do this, then you will have to create RPC and connect to your wallet through RPC with some programming language (can be what you want python, php....) that will take addresses and put them into table in SQL