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Amazon Web Services For Dummies

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Create dynamic cloud-based websites with Amazon Web Services and this friendly guide! As the largest cloud computing platform in the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides one of the most popular web services options available. This easy-to-understand guide is the perfect introduction to the Amazon Web Services platform and all it can do for you. You'll learn about the Amazon Web Services tool set; how different web services (including S3, Amazon EC2, and Amazon Flexible Payments) and Glacier work; and how you can implement AWS in your organization. Amazon Web Services For Dummies is exactly what you need to get your head in the cloud with Amazon Web Services!

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

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194 people want to read

About the author

Bernard Golden

14 books2 followers

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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
Profile Image for Jose Papo.
260 reviews154 followers
September 29, 2013
Many for Dummies books are great. This is one of them. If you are new or even already uses AWS you will love this book. Bernard Golden wrote a gem and in this book he explains all AWS services (until September 2013).

The first time someone logs in the AWS Management Console the person usually see the multitude of services available and don't know how to start. Golden helps the reader to understand all AWS services found in the console and when and how to use each one.

The book starts explaining AWS Design and Philosophy and Bernard really nailed how Amazon thought about providing great customer value with a low cost. With this strategy Amazon is helping to democratize access to Infromation Technology and Computing resources everywhere in the world.

The book explains all the foundation services like EC2, EBS, VPC, S3, RDS and Glacier. It goes in a very good level explaining how AWS Networking works and how you can isolate your resources using AWS Virtual Private Cloud.

Part 3 explains the purpose of the Platform Services like Simple Email Service and SQS and also the three available management services (Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation and OpsWorks). Golden helps you understand each one and when to use them.

To really grasp the benefits of AWS is important to know the Platform and Foundational Services. One of the great benefits of AWS is the automation and packaging of technologies like relational databases, NoSQL databases, Data Warehouses, Message Queues, Email Senders, Video Transcoders and etc as a service. The simple to use services helps a company to focus on their applications and businesses and not having to spend time and money on undifferentiated heavy lifting. That's why Bernard book is so important: it explains where to use those services in your application architecture.

The chapters I liked most:

Chapter 12: In this chapter Bernard put together a sample WordPress application and shows it starting with the application server and the database in a single instance and then he gradually changes the architecture until the WordPress application has a high available architecture with EC2 instances in different AZs, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ and an Elastic Load Balancer. Very interesting to see how easy is to scale and create high available architectures on AWS.

Chapter 14: In this chapter Golden summarizes Ten Fundamental Design Principles for Cloud Application Architectures. It's a must read to understand the benefits of a Cloud Native application and how to change the way you think about IT Infrastructure (for example, always knowing that things can fail and you need to think about how to deal with failure in every layer of your solution).
4 reviews
May 25, 2020
Game changer

An excellent introduction to Amazon Web Services. It gave me the confidence to pursue a web services based IT Strategy.
684 reviews27 followers
November 20, 2013
The book I read to research this post was Amazon Web Services For Dummies by Bernard Golden which is a very good book which I read at
http://safaribooksonline.com
Amazon is the biggest cloud service provider in the world. It's also one of the cheapest and the author quoted another provider provided a similiar service for 8 times the price of what Amazon were charging. Also Amazon itemize your bill so you know exactly what you are paying for which again is something many providers don't do. AWS begin with them offering Simple Storage Service later abbreviated to S3 in the days before cloud computing existed. It allowed you to store upto 5 GB per file which nowadays is much more and you paid according to how much storage you used. Nowadays there are more than 25 separate service offered and new ones coming online every few months. It used to be if you had a computer you upgraded it roughly every 2 years so as to keep within the system requirements to keep software compatible with your computer. With cloud computing the provider has to provide the heavy duty hardware to run the cloud service so you can upgrade your computers less frequently. Also usually when software is offered as a cloud product it's offered at a cheaper price than if if it was on cd rom or dvd rom. However you pay a monthly subscription. I really enjoyed reading this book particularly because it explain what a lot of the AWS individual products did in understandable terms.
6 reviews
February 18, 2015
This was my first ever Dummies book. I got this because I changed jobs and wanted to learn the basics about AWS fast in order to get productive in my new job. The book helped me understand all the building blocks of the AWS ecosystem. It does not go too deep into any subject really, but it serves as a pretty good introduction. The writer seems overly ecstatic about AWS though, and the writing becomes quite a praise at times. Writing-style, I think, could have been more objective and down-to-the-point at times. The last part, "setting up a real AWS app", was really good as it summed up what was discussed in all the earlier chapters in a pragmatic way.
21 reviews1 follower
May 30, 2015
I read both "Amazon Web Services for Dummies" and the "Programming Amazon EC2" by O'Reilley Press. The strongest part of the for dummies book is that they explained the concepts really well (like what is an elastic load balancer vs an elastic beanstalk). The O'Reilley book was really good at showing syntax examples (i.e. - how do I actually start an instance of EC2 from the command line). The for dummies book did show how to use the web interface. Overall, I enjoyed both of the books, but I do feel that they complement each other and that you would really need to read both. Maybe someone could make a better synthesis book that explains both the fundamentals and the implementation details.
Profile Image for Jose Manuel.
241 reviews4 followers
June 11, 2015
si no tienes ni idea de servicios en la nube, quizas este libro te sirva de algo. Sin tener en cuenta que desde que se ha escrito hasta hoy, AWS cambia de manera vertiginosa.
Sin embargo, el libro falla cuando se adentra en los aspectos avanzados, que se ventila de un plumazo en un par de capitulos demasiado genericos.
Profile Image for Sathyanarayanan D.
51 reviews6 followers
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December 14, 2016
Wonderful start. If you ever want to conquer this territory (AWS), this is where you start.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews

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