Thank you for picking up a copy of this book. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has amazed everyone: Amazon has made lots of friends, and all its “enemies” are too busy admiring AWS to do much fighting back. At the moment, there is no comparable public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); AWS offers the services at a scale that has not been seen before. We wrote this book so you can get the most out of AWS’ services. If you come from conventional hardware infrastructures, once you are on AWS, you won’t want to go back.

AWS is not easy; it combines skills of several different (established) crafts. It is different from traditional systems administration, and it’s not just developing a piece of software. If you have practiced one or both of these skills, all you need is to be inquisitive and open to learning.

Our background is in software engineering. We are computer scientists with extensive software engineering experience in all sorts of different fields and organizations. But the cloud in general and AWS in particular caught our interest some years ago. We got serious about this by building Decaf, an Android smartphone application that manages Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) accounts. We were finalists in the Android Developer Challenge in 2009. We will use Decaf to illustrate various AWS services and techniques throughout this book.

Around the same time, in early 2010, we decided we wanted to build applications on AWS. We founded 9Apps and set out to find a select group of partners who shared our development interests. Our expertise is AWS, and our responsibility is to keep it running at all times. We design, build, and operate these infrastructures.