The AWS platform is growing at a rapid rate, and it's being increasingly adopted across all industries and sectors. As the saying goes, friends don't let friends build data centers. No matter how you look at it, the model of pay-as-you-go compute, network, and storage is here to stay. It's also becoming increasingly hard to argue against standing on the shoulders of giants, especially when you look the rate with which features and enhancements are added to the AWS platform compared to what you'd typically get out of other cloud providers or a so-called private cloud.
We work with a lot of technical professionals who are highly knowledgeable in their domain, but often completely new to the AWS platform. Alternatively, they might be familiar with AWS but new to automation and infrastructure code practices.
We wanted to write a book for these people.
This book is intended to kick-start your AWS journey by providing recipes, patterns, and best practices across the areas we are often asked to help with on our consulting engagements. All the recipes and recommendations contained in this book are based on our personal experiences and observations from our time helping customers on the AWS platform.
CloudFormation is the AWS-native method for automating the (repeatable and reliable) deployment of AWS resources, and we use it extensively throughout this book. The recipes that follow will help you get well acquainted with CloudFormation, and you'll soon be on your way to customizing and building your own templates. With so much power at your fingertips, there's a lot of potential for finding yourself in a rabbit hole. This book aims to steer you in the right direction and help you adopt the platform in a sustainable and maintainable way.
Chapter 1, AWS Fundamentals, is an overview of Infrastructure as Code, CloudFormation, and the AWS CLI tools.
Chapter 2, Managing AWS Accounts, covers everything you need to know to manage your accounts and get started with AWS organizations.
Chapter 3, Storage and Content Delivery, shows you how to back up your data and serve file objects to your users.
Chapter 4, Using AWS Compute, dives deep into how to run VMs (EC2 instances) on AWS, how to auto scale them, and how to create and manage load balancers.
Chapter 5, Management Tools, provides an overview of how to audit your account and monitor your infrastructure.
Chapter 6, Database Services, shows you how to create, manage, and scale databases on the AWS platform.
Chapter 7, Networking, introduces private networks, routing, and DNS.
Chapter 8, Security and Identity, offers advice and practical solutions for managing identities and role-based access.
Chapter 9, Estimating Costs, provides an overview of how to estimate your spend on the AWS platform as well as how to reduce your costs by purchasing reserved instance capacity.
The recipes in this book show you how to deploy a wide variety of resources on AWS, so you'll need at least one AWS account with full administrative access. You'll also need a text editor to edit YAML/JSON CloudFormation templates, and the AWS CLI tools, which are supported on common operating systems (macOS/Linux/Windows).
This book is for anyone with a technical background who is interested in using AWS, either for moving existing workloads or deploying completely new applications. Those who want to learn CloudFormation will also find this book useful.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it..., How it works..., There's more..., and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
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: "You should now have an active session under PowerUserRole in the application account."
A block of code is set as follows:
Parameters: EC2KeyName: Type: String Description: EC2 Key Pair to launch with
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
Parameters:
EC2KeyName:
Type: String
Description: EC2 Key Pair to launch withAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --output json 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: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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