| Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches |
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Author: David Clinton PART 3 FOOD FOR THOUGHT: WHAT ELSE CAN AWS DO FOR YOU?Chapter 18 Building hybrid infrastructure Due to various concerns (e.g. security), an exclusively cloud solution may not be tenable. A popular alternative option is Hybrid, where on-premise infrastructure is mixed with the cloud offering. The chapter discusses some hybrid storage solutions including:
Next, various hybrid connectivity options are outlines, including:
There’s a brief look at Disaster Recovery, where data backups are held on the cloud. This may well be the initial entry point into AWS for many on-premise applications. The chapter ends with a look at the EC2 Systems Manager, this provides various admin tools (e.g. deployment, scheduling updates), a useful tool for connecting on-premises and the cloud. Chapter 19 Cloud automation: working with Elastic Beanstalk, Docker, and Lambda Automation can significantly reduce human error. This chapter looks at some common services that provide automation. The first product examined is AWS Elastic Beanstalk, this service provides a whole infrastructure at the click of a button. The infrastructure includes EC2 instances, load balancer, auto-scaling, and system health monitoring. All that you need to do is select the type of infrastructure you want, and then once it’s provisioned, you select “Upload and Deploy” to upload your application code. Tailoring your requirements is still possible, but for many generic systems, Elastic Beanstalk is all that’s needed to get your scalable Highly Available system up and running – in minutes! The next service examined is the AWS EC2 Container. Docker is an instance of a container, which is a lightweight virtual server that can be used to perform configurable tasks (e.g. deployable pre-built software images). This makes creating a defined server environment very easy, and it’s ideal for subsequent sharing of the image. The chapter ends with a look at AWS Lambda, here a function is executed with minimum resources, without the need to fire up a whole EC2 instance. This is ideal for small and infrequent tasks. This chapter should be a revelation to the reader, and business owners, much of the work you need to do to create your systems on the cloud, has already been done or has been greatly simplified. Chapter 20 Everything else (nearly) AWS contains a great many services and the author has covered the core ones. This chapter provides a brief overview of some other useful services, these include:
This chapter provides a useful, if deliberately constrained, overview of some very helpful AWS services for you to investigate further. Chapter 21 Never the end AWS is constantly changing, with 100+ services, additional services and features added continuously. This chapter shows how you can continue learning about AWS. A useful recommendation is to subscribe to the AWS Announcements email, strangely the link wasn’t included in the book, it’s: https://aws.amazon.com/subscribe-to-aws-announcements/. Additionally, there’s a What’s New at AWS page https://aws.amazon.com/new/. To get help with problems, there’s a massive amount of documentation to peruse https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html. Additionally, AWS has various forums where you can post your questions https://forums.aws.amazon.com/index.jspa. Another way of learning is AWS’s Certifications https://aws.amazon.com/certification/. The author rightly maintains that the real reward is what you learn on the way to certification. I often complain that books do not give enough guidance on where to get further and deeper information, but this chapter does exactly that! Conclusion This book aims to teach you AWS in around 20 hours, and generally succeeds. It will take maybe twice as long if you follow all the practicals suggested. Even longer if you run into Linux problems. Overall, this book is easy to read, with good explanations and flow between sections, helpful diagrams, and useful website links for further information. A gentle degree of humour is given that assists the reading. The author acknowledges the screenshots and some features may get out of date quickly, owing to the rapid change in AWS features. The book’s early exercises are based on AWS EC2 having Ubuntu version 16.04, however when I did the practicals, the version was 18.04. More importantly, several of the Linux commands (and LAMP related software) given in the book gave me problems, searching the internet showed others had problems with similar commands. Too often the author would say something like “Didn’t work on your first try? You’re in good company. Carefully go through the command again from scratch. And don’t forget to do an internet search for the error message you receive—you’ll be surprised how many others have already been there.” While this is very much part of the life of a professional developer, I would not expect to experience this pain in a book that purports to teach me about AWS. The initial chapters where frustrating for me (I’m only an occasional user of Linux/LAMP), I wonder how many people gave up in frustration?! Which is a pity, because the other chapters, away from Linux, are mostly trouble free. Perhaps Amazon should provide a stable sandboxed AWS learning area that authors can use to teach others? That said, if you’re persistent (which probably means every developer!), you will cover a lot of ground in this book and be rewarded accordingly. I liked the inclusion of a chapter on “where to go next”, with some very useful pointers for further and deeper development. So, I’m a bit torn on how to rate this book. If you get Linux/LAMP problems, you might easily give up. If you can get over these problems (or ignore them?), this book offers a great introduction to AWS. 
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 07 May 2019 ) |