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.