Cloud computing has definitely matured and evolved a lot ever since its conception. Practically all major industries and top fortune 500 companies today run their application workloads on clouds to reap all sorts of benefits, ranging from reduced costs, better availability of their applications, and easier manageability to on-demand scalability, and much more! At the forefront of this cloud innovation is a market leader like no other: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS provides a ton of easy-to-use products and services that you can leverage to build, host, deploy, and manage your applications on the cloud. It also provides a variety of ways to interact with these services, such as SDKs, APIs, CLIs, and even a web-based management console.
This book is a one stop shop where you can find all there is to getting started with the core AWS services, which include EC2, S3, RDS, VPCs, and a whole lot more! If you are a sysadmin or an architect or someone who just wants to learn and explore various aspects of administering AWS services, then this book is the right choice for you! Each chapter of this book is designed to help you understand the individual services' concepts as well as gain hands-on experience by practicing simple and easy to follow steps. The chapters also highlight some key best practices and recommendations that you ought to keep in mind when working with AWS.
Chapter 1, Introducing Amazon Web Services, covers the introductory concepts and general benefits of cloud computing along with an overview of Amazon Web Services and its overall platform. The chapter also walks you through your first AWS signup process, and finally ends with the configuration of the AWS CLI.
Chapter 2, Security and Access Management, discusses the overall importance of security and how you can achieve it using an AWS core service known as Identity and Access Management (IAM). The chapter walks you through the steps required to create and administer AWS users, groups, as well as how to create and assign permissions and policies to them.
Chapter 3, Images and Instances, provides hands-on knowledge about EC2 instances and images, and how you can create and manage them using both the AWS Management Console as well as the AWS CLI.
Chapter 4, Security, Storage, Networking and Lots More!, discusses some of the key aspects that you can leverage to provide added security for your applications and instances. The chapter also provides an in-depth overview of EC2 instance storage as well as networking options followed by some recommendations and best practices.
Chapter 5, Building Your Own Private Clouds Using Amazon VPC, introduces you to the concept and benefits provided by AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service. The chapter also provides an in-depth look at various VPC deployment strategies and how you can best leverage them for your own environments.
Chapter 6, Monitoring Your AWS Infrastructure, covers AWS's primary monitoring service, called as Amazon CloudWatch. In this chapter, you will learn how to effectively create and manage alerts, loggings, and notifications for your EC2 instances, as well as your AWS environment.
Chapter 7, Manage Your Applications with Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, discusses some of the key AWS services that you should leverage to create a dynamically scalable and highly available web application.
Chapter 8, Database-as-a-Service Using Amazon RDS, provides an in-depth look at how you can effectively design, create, manage, and monitor your RDS instances on AWS.
Chapter 9, Working with Simple Storage Service, provides practical knowledge and design considerations that you should keep in mind when working with Amazon's infinitely scalable and durable object storage known as Amazon S3.
Chapter 10, Extended AWS Services for Your Application, provides a brief overview of add-on AWS services that you can leverage for enhancing your applications' performance and availability.