Chapter 1. Introduction

The paradigm for development of applications has shifted in many ways over the years. Instead of just developing pure applications, aimed at specific system configurations, the trend has moved towards web applications. These applications present a very different set of challenges not just for the developers, but also for the people who manage the systems that host them. The reaction to this need to build, test, and manage such web applications has been to develop an abstraction on top of the hardware that allows for the ability to bring up entire virtualized environments quickly and consistently.

Throughout these chapters, you will learn basic design principles for applications and known issues. These may not be completely compatible with all application types but should serve as a basic toolkit for bigger design patterns. It is also very important to note that AWS adds new services all the time, some of which by default solve these design patterns at the time of writing. If your software or services handle sensitive data and have in-flight or at-rest requirements, be very careful to read how each individual AWS-provided service handles data.

The topics that are covered in this chapter are: