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.

To start using this book, you will need the following set of software installed on your local desktop:

This book is intended for any and all IT professionals who wish to learn and implement AWS for their own environments and application hosting. Although no prior experience or knowledge is required, it will be beneficial for you to have basic Linux knowledge as well as some understanding of networking concepts and server virtualization.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

{
"Id": "Policy1448937262025",
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
  {
"Sid": "Stmt1448937260611",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Principal": "*",
  }
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

CREATE TABLE doge
(
idint(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
namevarchar(255),
description text,

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Next, select the Launch DB Instance button to bring up the DB Launch Wizard:"

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