Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a public cloud provider. It provides infrastructure and platform services at a pay-per-use rate. This means you get on-demand access to resources that you used to have to buy outright. You can get access to enterprise-grade services while only paying for what you need, usually down to the hour.
AWS prides itself on providing the primitives to developers so that they can build and scale the solutions that they require.
In order to follow along with the recipes, you will need an AWS account. Create an account at https://aws.amazon.com/ by clicking on the Sign Up button and entering your details.
Note
Even though we will be taking advantage of the free tier wherever possible, you will need a valid credit card to complete the signup process. Go to https://aws.amazon.com/free/ for more information. Note that the free tier only applies for the first year of your account's lifetime.
A fundamental concept of AWS is that its services and the solutions built on top of them are architected for failure. This means that a failure of the underlying resources is a scenario actively planned for, rather than avoided until it cannot be ignored.
Due to this, all the services and resources available are divided up in to geographically diverse Regions. Using specific regions means you can provide services to your users that are optimized for speed and performance.
Within a region, there are always multiple Availability Zones (a.k.a. AZ). Each AZ represents a geographically distinct—but still close—physical data center. AZs have their own facilities and power source, so an event that might take a single AZ offline is unlikely to affect the other AZs in the region.
The smaller regions have at least two AZs, and the largest has five.
At the time of writing, the following regions are active:
Code | Name | Availability Zones |
| N. Virginia | 5 |
| Ohio | 3 |
| N. California | 3 |
| Oregon | 3 |
| Canada | 2 |
| Ireland | 3 |
| London | 2 |
| Frankfurt | 2 |
| Tokyo | 3 |
| Seoul | 2 |
| Singapore | 2 |
| Sydney | 3 |
| Mumbai | 2 |
| Sao Paulo | 3 |
The web-based console is the first thing you will see after creating your AWS account, and you will often refer to it when viewing and confirming your configuration.
The AWS web console
The console provides an overview of all the services available as well as associated billing and cost information. Each service has its own section, and the information displayed depends on the service being viewed. As new features and services are released, the console will change and improve. Don't be surprised if you log in and things have changed from one day to the next.
Note
Keep in mind that the console always shows your resources by region. If you cannot see a resource that you created, make sure you have the right region selected.
Choose the region closest to your physical location for the fastest response times. Note that not all regions have the same services available. The larger, older regions generally have the most services available. Some of the newer or smaller regions (that might be closest to you) might not have all services enabled yet. While services are continually being released to regions, you may have to use another region if you simply must use a newer service.
Note
The us-east-1 (a.k.a. North Virginia) region is special given its status as the first region. All services are available there, and new services are always released there.
As you get more advanced with your use of AWS, you will spend less time in the console and more time controlling your services programmatically via the AWS CLI tool and CloudFormation, which we will go into in more detail in the next few topics.
Where possible, we have based the recipes around a CloudFormation template. CloudFormation is the Infrastructure as Code service from AWS.
Note
Where CloudFormation was not applicable, we have used the AWS CLI to make the process repeatable and automatable.
Since the recipes are based on CloudFormation templates, you can easily combine different templates to achieve your desired outcomes. By editing the templates or joining them, you can create more useful and customized configurations with minimal effort.