Andreas Wittig - Amazon Web Services in Action

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Throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, I worked in the rank and file of system administrators who endeavored to keep network services online, secure, and available to users. At that time, working with systems was a tedious, monotonous affair involving cable slinging, server racking, operating system installation from optical media, and manual software configuration. Any businesses wishing to engage in the emerging online marketplace bore the burden of managing physical servers, accepting the associated capital and operating costs, and hoping for enough success to justify those expenses.

When Amazon Web Services emerged in 2006, it signaled a shift in the industry. Many of the previously repetitive, time-consuming tasks became unnecessary, and the cost of launching new services plummeted. Suddenly anyone with a good idea and the ability to execute could build a global business on world-class infrastructure at a starting cost of just a few cents per hour. In terms of cumulative disruption of an established market, a few technologies stand above all others, and AWS is among them.

Today the march of progress continues unabated. In November 2014, at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS announced to more than 13,000 live attendees that the number of major new features and services had nearly doubled each year since 2008. Usage of existing services grew on a similar scale, with a roughly 100% year-over-year increase for S3 and EC2. This growth offers new opportunities for the engineers and businesses that strive to solve some of the most challenging problems in building an online marketplace.

Needless to say, this unprecedented power and flexibility comes at the expense of considerable complexity. In response to and often in anticipation of customer demand, AWS has assembled dozens of services with thousands of features that enable yet confound new users. The benefits are accompanied by a brand-new lexicon and distinct architectural and technical best practices. This motley collection of sometimes overlapping services usually intimidates the beginner.

Amazon Web Services in Action slices through the challenges of learning AWS by using examples to cement knowledge in the minds of readers. Andreas and Michael focus on the most prominent services and features that users are likely to encounter. Security considerations are placed front and center, helping to establish that hosting systems in the cloud can be safe for even the most sensitive applications. And because many readers will be footing the bill from AWS personally, any examples that incur charges are called out explicitly throughout the text.

As a consultant, author, and, at heart, an engineer, I celebrate all efforts to introduce the wonderful world of cloud computing to new users. Amazon Web Services in Action is at the head of the pack as a confident, practical guide through the maze of the industrys leading cloud platform.

With this book as your sidekick, what will you build on the AWS cloud?

B EN W HALEY

AWS C OMMUNITY H ERO AND A UTHOR OF T HE UNIX AND L INUX S YSTEM A DMINISTRATION H ANDBOOK

When we started to develop software, we didnt care about operations. We wrote code, and someone else was responsible for deployment and operations. There was a huge gap between software development and IT operations. On top of that, releasing new features was a huge risk because it was impossible to test all the changes to software and infrastructure manually. Every six months, when new features needed to be deployed, we experienced a nightmare.

Time passed, and we became responsible for a product. Our goal was to iterate quickly and to be able to release new features to the product every week. Our software was responsible for managing money, so the quality of the software and infrastructure was as important as the ability to innovate. But the inflexible on-premises infrastructure and the outdated process of deploying software made that goal impossible to reach. We started to look for a better way.

Our search lead us to Amazon Web Services, which offered us a flexible and reliable way to build and operate our applications. The possibility of automating every part of our infrastructure was fascinating. Step by step, we dove into the different AWS services, from virtual servers to distributed message queues. Being able to outsource tasks like operating a SQL database or terminating HTTPS connections on a load balancer saved us a lot of time. We invested this time in automating testing and operations for our entire infrastructure.