First of all I would note that my review of this book is based on the rough cuts edition published on Safari and as such is not a fully final version of the text.
However, even at this stage, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone looking to get started with AWS. While there is huge amounts of material already on the web about AWS, it can be overwhelming for a newbie due to the huge range of services offered by AWS and this book is a create summary and introduction.
The author starts off by introducing the basic concepts around EC2, which is pretty much the first thing everyone with an AWS account looks at. The book touches very briefly on the GUI aspects of the AWS management console but very quickly forgoes this quickly to focus exclusively on how to programatically administer AWS.
The book then starts looking at instances, CloudFormation (a rather neat provisioning tool covering a lot of AWS services) and AMIs, before explaining the fundamentals around securing access with IAM and network security with security groups.
Following this the author then touches on configuration management using Puppet, and then ties all this together by walking through an example setup of a web based application within AWS that utilises the majority of the most common AWS services.
The final few chapters touch on log management, DNS, monitoring and backups, but these chapters at present are much lighter than the others. The focus of these chapters seem to be really about helping the sys admin understand some of the main caveats when considering these activities in AWS, rather than being a detailed discussion on how each can be implemented within AWS. I'm not sure if this is a result of the book not being fully finalised or simply due to the potentially huge scope that would exist if the author tried to cover these topics in more detail.
Throughout the book I particularly liked how the author highlights not only the good points of AWS, but also where there are gaps in the various services and the potential issues that a sys admin may hit when trying to work around there. It's these bits of info that I think differentiate the book from the material you'll get online as obviously sometimes that published material on AWS can be very focused on how everything "just works".
If you're looking for a high level introduction to the fundamentals of AWS system administration, then I'd definitely recommend this book.
Combining this book with a higher level cloud architecture book such as Cloud Architecture Patterns, make for an ideal quick intro to cloud computing and AWS.
I really hope the author goes on to develop a further more advanced book covering some of the other AWS services and more complex use cases within enterprises as I think this would be a great addition to my library!
Links:
Safari: http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/book/operating-systems-and-server-administration/9781449342562/
However, even at this stage, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone looking to get started with AWS. While there is huge amounts of material already on the web about AWS, it can be overwhelming for a newbie due to the huge range of services offered by AWS and this book is a create summary and introduction.
The author starts off by introducing the basic concepts around EC2, which is pretty much the first thing everyone with an AWS account looks at. The book touches very briefly on the GUI aspects of the AWS management console but very quickly forgoes this quickly to focus exclusively on how to programatically administer AWS.
The book then starts looking at instances, CloudFormation (a rather neat provisioning tool covering a lot of AWS services) and AMIs, before explaining the fundamentals around securing access with IAM and network security with security groups.
Following this the author then touches on configuration management using Puppet, and then ties all this together by walking through an example setup of a web based application within AWS that utilises the majority of the most common AWS services.
The final few chapters touch on log management, DNS, monitoring and backups, but these chapters at present are much lighter than the others. The focus of these chapters seem to be really about helping the sys admin understand some of the main caveats when considering these activities in AWS, rather than being a detailed discussion on how each can be implemented within AWS. I'm not sure if this is a result of the book not being fully finalised or simply due to the potentially huge scope that would exist if the author tried to cover these topics in more detail.
Throughout the book I particularly liked how the author highlights not only the good points of AWS, but also where there are gaps in the various services and the potential issues that a sys admin may hit when trying to work around there. It's these bits of info that I think differentiate the book from the material you'll get online as obviously sometimes that published material on AWS can be very focused on how everything "just works".
If you're looking for a high level introduction to the fundamentals of AWS system administration, then I'd definitely recommend this book.
Combining this book with a higher level cloud architecture book such as Cloud Architecture Patterns, make for an ideal quick intro to cloud computing and AWS.
I really hope the author goes on to develop a further more advanced book covering some of the other AWS services and more complex use cases within enterprises as I think this would be a great addition to my library!
Links:
Safari: http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/book/operating-systems-and-server-administration/9781449342562/
