Book Review: Python And AWS Cookbook

I’ve been playing around with AWS properly for the last couple of months and had mainly been getting myself up to speed with the key security considerations, the console, the various services AWS provides, while playing around with setting up an ELK stack in AWS.

I’ve also been interested in playing around more with Python so figured this would be a good opportunity to combine both and get a better understanding of AWS and Python at the same time.

This book introduces you to the Boto Python interface to AWS and walks you through a series of very simple examples of how to use it.

The book is primarily split into two section; one covering EC2 and the other S3. Both sections cover all the basics that you could look for, including how to enumerate the EC2 instances/S3 buckets in your account, how to loop through regions (if needed), how to create new instances or buckets and how to edit tag, metadata and such. The book also covers some basics of ELBs, security groups and S3 permissions so basically, most of what you’d need to do some basic scripting of EC2 and S3.

The book briefly touches on CloudWatch and SNS but nothing too in-depth, nor does it cover any of the other AWS services Boto current supports (See here for the current list).

A lot of people have criticized this book as only touching the surface of AWS, and that's definitely true.. you can know nothing about Boto at the start and get through this book in around eight hours (probably much less if you know Python beforehand.. which I didn’t). However, at the end you’ll know enough to get and running and can then loop back to either the Boto or AWS documentation to fill in any more gaps.

If you’ve just used the AWS console and haven’t tried you hand at the API, then this is a perfect intro to the nuances that exist with the APIs and ultimately you’ll learn way more about AWS because you’ll start seeing options or constraints in the API calls that you may not even realize exist (or at least I know I did!).

While there’s nothing much here that you can’t get directly from the Boto documentation, I always like following a book along as opposed to jumping around read-me docs so if you’re similar, and looking for a book to kickstart your understanding of Boto and to help you put together some basic scripts for AWS, I really recommend this.

I'd love to see an updated edition of this book, as it was released in 2011 and things around moving so quickly on AWS, it would benefit from a refresh and also some more examples added.

Links:
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Python-AWS-Cookbook-Mitch-Garnaat/dp/144930544X/
Safari https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/python-and-aws/9781449308100/