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Amazon Web Services For Dummies®

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Amazon
Web Services

FOR
DUMMIES®

A Wiley Brand

Bernard Golden

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For Dummies, A Wiley Brand

Praise for Amazon Web Services For Dummies

This is a great resource for anyone considering the jump into cloud computing. Golden accurately explores the roster of AWS services while clearly illustrating ways for developers to make applications easier to build and manage. He manages to address both business requirements and technical content in a way that will appeal to almost any audience.

— Jeff Barr, Sr. Technology Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

One of the challenges Bitnami users face is understanding the breadth and power of AWS. Amazon Web Services For Dummies helps our users build a great foundation of AWS skills. Anyone who is new to AWS and wants to be successful should start with this book.

— Erica Brescia, COO and co-founder of Bitnami

Netflix is all-in on AWS. We believe it is the richest, most scalable, most innovative cloud platform in the industry. Building AWS skills is critical for careers today — and Amazon Web Services For Dummies is the best resource I know of to learn AWS from the ground up. Buy this book to learn what your future will look like.

— Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix Cloud Architect

Introduction

This book is designed with one purpose in mind: to make it easy for you, the reader, to understand and begin using Amazon Web Services (AWS) — an emerging technology platform that is profoundly disrupting the technology industry and enabling hundreds of thousands of individuals, businesses, and nonprofit organizations to gain easy access to on-demand computing resources.

About This Book

In a sense, this book is an extension of my earlier book Virtualization For Dummies (Wiley Publishing), which has a chapter describing “The Future of Virtualization.” In my research to identify which direction virtualization would take, I came across Amazon Web Services, a then-new offering was referred to by Amazon employees as Infrastructure as a Service. To indicate how briefly this new type of computing has been available, the term cloud computing was still more than a year away when Virtualization For Dummies was published.

As I spoke to Amazon representatives about the company’s new offering, I experienced the same reaction I had when first exposed to open source software — a visceral response that made me ask out loud: “If this service is available to users, who will stick with the old way of doing things?”

Nothing in the subsequent years has changed my mind — in fact, that experience strengthens my conviction that cloud computing in general, and Amazon Web Services in particular, will transform the way applications are designed and built. I’ve worked with people from many companies who have resigned themselves to the length of the usual IT resource provisioning process — taking six weeks or more to obtain a virtual machine. When I demonstrate the ability of AWS to provision an instance (Amazon’s term for a virtual machine) in ten minutes or less, these people regard what they’re seeing with disbelief, staggered that the conventional (lengthy) provisioning process isn’t somehow set in stone.

Amazon continues to challenge the incumbent community of technology vendors, releasing new services and cutting prices at an unrelenting pace. I fully expect that a decade from now, AWS will be one of the top two or three global technology vendors, and that a number of today’s giants will be gone, driven out of business, or into forced mergers by their inability to compete on Amazon’s terms.

But (there’s always a but, isn’t there?) how to get started is a challenge that many people face when they consider using AWS. AWS documentation is quite thorough, but you won’t find there a general guide for beginners to start from scratch and develop new skills.

For this reason, I proposed this book to the publisher. I’ve heard from many people who are excited about using AWS but frustrated about how to learn about and use AWS. The Powers That Be at Wiley and I agreed that an introductory book about AWS that helps newbies begin using it productively would be extremely useful — and so we set to work to create the book that you now hold in your hands. I hope that you’ll find it a useful and helpful roadmap for your AWS journey.

Using This Book

This book contains a mix of text, URLs, and terminal commands that you can execute. Please note these stylistic tidbits:

Foolish Assumptions

This book is designed to address a range of readers. Part I is an overview of AWS and an introduction to how the service works. It’s appropriate for executives, project managers, and IT managers wanting to gain a basic understanding of the service so that they have a context for the benefits their organization can realize by using AWS. No particular technical background is assumed or necessary in Part I.

If you plan to work with AWS in a hands-on manner, Parts II and III provide a comprehensive review of all AWS offerings. I devote a full chapter to the use of the AWS technology, with a set of exercises that begin with a simple example and progressively build into a more complex application that leverages a number of AWS products. A technical background is necessary to comprehend Parts II and III; however, none of the information or exercises is particularly difficult from a technology perspective.

Icons Used in This Book

tip.eps The Tip icon marks tips (duh!) and shortcuts that you can use to make using Amazon Web Services easier.

remember.eps Remember icons mark information that’s especially important to know. To siphon off the most important information in each chapter, just skim these icons.

technicalstuff.eps The Technical Stuff icon marks information of a highly technical nature that you can normally skip over.

warning_bomb.eps The Warning icon tells you to watch out! It marks important information that may save you headaches.

Beyond the Book

The technology industry continues to invent and evolve rapidly — and that goes double for cloud computing. It’s important to have up-to-the-minute information on important new technology trends, and we’re committed to providing new information as AWS evolves over time.

Here are three places you can look for information and help outside of this book:

Unlike a novel, which requires you to begin at the beginning and carry on methodically throughout the book, Amazon Web Services For Dummies is designed to support what I like to call “random access” — if you hear about a particular AWS product and want to find out more, well, dig right in to that section of the book. If you want to understand the phenomenon of AWS, read the first part and then pick and choose among other areas that seem intriguing. This book supports your learning pattern and imposes no “official” reading approach. Dive in anywhere that makes sense to you.

Part I
Getting Started with AWS

9781118571835-pp0101.eps

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