AWS System Administration

Chapter 1. Setting Up AWS Tools

The role of the system administrator is changing. Just a few years ago, most sysadmins dealt with server farms of physical hardware and performed detailed capacity planning. Scaling up your application meant ordering new hardware and perhaps spending time racking it up in the datacenter. Now there is a huge section of the industry that has never touched physical hardware. We scale up by issuing an API call or clicking a button in a web page to bring new capacity online.

Although the term has been co-opted by marketers, the cloud is an amazing thing. In this context, we are using cloud to refer to the idea of scalable, on-demand computing and application services, rather than cloud-based services like Google Mail.

As more competition enters the cloud market space, its appeal for sysadmins and business owners alike is increasing on an almost daily basis. Amazon Web Services continues to drive the cloud computing market forward by frequently introducing new tools and services (in fact, they are introduced with such regularity that writing a book about them is a never-ending pursuit).

Economies of scale are constantly pushing down the price of cloud services. Although environments like AWS or Google Compute Engine are not yet suitable for every application, it is becoming increasingly clear that cloud skills are becoming a required part of a well-rounded sysadmin’s toolkit.

For businesses, the cloud opens up new avenues of flexibility. Tech teams can do things ...