About this Book
This book introduces the most important AWS services and how you can combine them to get the most out of Amazon Web Services. Most of our examples use typical web applications to demonstrate important points. We pay a lot of attention to security topics, so we followed the principle of “least privilege” in this book. And we used official AWS tools whenever possible.
Automation sneaks in throughout the book, so by the end you’ll be comfortable with using the automation tool CloudFormation to set up everything you’ve learned in an automated way; this will be one of the most important things you will learn from our book.
You’ll find three types of code listings in this book: Bash, JSON, and Node.js/JavaScript. We use Bash to create tiny scripts to interact with AWS in an automated way. JSON is used to describe infrastructure in a way that CloudFormation can understand. And we use the Node.js platform to create small applications in JavaScript when programming is required to use services.
We focus on Linux as the operating system for virtual servers in the book. Examples are based on open source software whenever possible.
Chapter 1 introduces cloud computing and AWS. You’ll learn about key concepts and basics, and you’ll create and set up your AWS account.
Chapter 2 brings Amazon Web Services into action. You’ll spin up and dive into a complex cloud infrastructure with ease.