AWS System Administration

Foreword

When Amazon created its first cloud, well before anyone had coined the term “DevOps,” few if any could conceive of how expansive it would become. From its humble roots in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2002 and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2006, AWS has expanded to a collection of over 100 services in over 15 regions around the world. This growing platform of capabilities can be intimidating at first glance and many wonder where to even begin. While there have been scores of blog posts and wikis devoted to passing on the tribal wisdom learned through sometimes painful experiences, it has been difficult to find an entry point that meets the needs of the budding cloud practitioner.

But who exactly is a “cloud practitioner”? We’re entering a period where a working knowledge of cloud configuration and administration fundamentals are considered a requirement for a wide series of industries. We’re currently in an environment that goes well beyond a concept of self-service IT. We now assume that users will no longer be just consumers of information technology resources, but cocreators. A research scientist developing code to analyze genomic data now not only helps create the data schema but also configures the compute and storage resources necessary to support their analysis. An industrial engineer executing high-performance fluid dynamics calculations has to know how many virtual CPUs and memory to request to best optimize the performance of her application. ...