Sebastopol, CA—If you plan to use Amazon Web Services to run applications in the cloud, the end-to-end approach in Programming Amazon EC2 (O'Reilly Media, $34.99 USD) will save you needless trial and error. You'll find practical guidelines for designing and building applications with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and a host of supporting AWS tools, with a focus on critical issues such as load balancing, monitoring, and automation.

"The benefits of Amazon AWS (or other public IAAS clouds) are becoming more and more clear," says coauthor Jurg van Vliet (@truthtrap). "People are getting ready to try it out or move to it. With our book, people can get up to speed within a couple of hours and have their first app running before the day is over. Within a week they will understand how to change the application to make use of particular Amazon AWS services, and they'll know what is necessary to grow when their success arrives."

How do you move an existing application to AWS, or design your application so that it scales effectively? How much storage will you require? Programming Amazon EC2 not only helps you get started, it will also keep you going once you're successfully positioned in the cloud. This book is a must-read for application architects, developers, and administrators.

• Determine your application's lifecycle and identify the AWS tools you need
• Learn how to build and run your application as part of the development process
• Migrate simple web applications to the cloud with EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and CloudFront content delivery
• Meet traffic demand with EC2's Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing
• Decouple your application using Simple Queue Service, Simple Notification Service, and other tools
• Use the right tools to minimize downtime, improve uptime, and manage your decoupled system

Advance Praise
"Jurg and Flavia have done a great job in this book building a practical guide on how to build real systems using AWS."
—Werner Vogels, VP & CTO at Amazon.com