Murty - Programming Amazon Web Services

In this book we explore the set of web services offered by Amazon that provide pay-as-you-go, virtual infrastructure, and we look at the practicalities of designing and building applications to take advantage of Amazons infrastructure services. We will provide detailed sample code that shows how to interact with the services application program interfaces (APIs), and we will discuss how the services can be used individually and in combination to build systems in the real world.

The first two chapters introduce the services we will use in this book and discuss how they work at the HTTP messaging level:

In this chapter, we introduce Amazons infrastructure services and discuss the main advantages and disadvantages of using online services to meet your infrastructure needs. To use Amazons services effectively, you may have to adjust your mindset and expectations: things work differently in the cloud.

To interact with the Amazon Web Services, you will need a communications library to create request messages that are structured to be readable to the services, and authenticated so that only you can access your protected data. You will also need to understand the response messages the services return. In this chapter, we describe how to construct and interpret the HTTP messages used by Amazons API interfaces. We will also provide code that demonstrates exactly how to work with these messages.

The remaining 11 chapters in the book focus on actually using the services through their API interfaces or by building on third-party libraries or services.

We devote seven chapters to explaining the key concepts, data models, behavior, and APIs of Amazons five infrastructure services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB. These chapters describe the features and capabilities of each service and provide an overview of the operations exposed by the service. They also include client implementation code written in Ruby and step-by-step guides to performing tasks with the API operations. You can use our sample code to follow along with the interactive sessions in these chapters and as a starting point for your own applications.

For S3, EC2, and SQS, we have included additional chapters in which we guide you through the process of building fully functional applications based on the services. These applications serve as realistic examples of how to put the infrastructure services to work. In these chapters, we will demonstrate how to use them to perform common tasks, and we will show off some of the many third-party libraries and tools that are available for these services:

How to use Amazons Simple Storage Service (S3) for online data storage.

Use your online data storage space to share large files with others and back up your files. You can also access your storage as if it were a standard Linux block device, or you can create a mediated access system to grant others limited and well-controlled access to your own S3 storage.

How to use Amazons Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service for online computing resources.

Learn how virtual Linux server instances operate in the EC2 service and how to create your own instances, customized to work exactly the way you want.