Bernard Golden - Amazon Web Services For Dummies

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Amazon Web Services For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Trademarks: Wiley, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and may not be used without written permission. Amazon Web Services is a trademark of Amazon Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013942773

ISBN 978-1-118-57183-5 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-65198-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-65226-8 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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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 companys 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. Ive 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 (Amazons term for a virtual machine) in ten minutes or less, these people regard what theyre seeing with disbelief, staggered that the conventional (lengthy) provisioning process isnt somehow set in stone.