This book assumes that you are familiar with at least the basics of cloud computing. Having an understanding of networking concepts will provide you with the background you'll need to be productive with AWS.

You need to have an AWS account to perform the steps mentioned in this book. AWS provides a free trial for one year; this will suffice.

Additionally, you will need access to the internet to download PuTTY to connect to instances. Any normal hardware configuration is good enough to access the AWS management portal from a browser, such as 4 GB RAM and a 500 GB hard disk.

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/PracticalAWSNetworking_ColorImages.pdf.

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Once the download is successful, extract the files using the tar zxpvf apache-tomcat-8.5.20.tar.gz</kbd> command."

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."