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AWS System Administration: Best Practices for Sysadmins in the Amazon Cloud
With platforms designed for rapid adaptation and failure recovery such as Amazon Web Services, cloud computing is more like programming than traditional system administration. Tools for automatic scaling and instance replacement allow even small DevOps teams to manage massively scalable application infrastructures―if team members drop their old views of development and operations and start mastering automation. This comprehensive guide shows developers and system administrators how to configure and manage AWS services including EC2, CloudFormation, Elastic Load Balancing, S3, and Route 53. Sysadms will learn will learn to automate their favorite tools and processes; developers will pick up enough ops knowledge to build a robust and resilient AWS application infrastructure.
381 pages, Paperback
First published October 11, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 4, 2022
It's not a bad way to learn something about AWS, but would definitely recommend a different resource instead.
First and foremost, it's already dated. There's a second edition coming in 2022 that may solve this issue, but that remains to be seen.
Second, and more importantly, it's all over the place with its examples.
- It talks way too much about puppet, which is great if you're into puppet, and wasteful if you know you're never gonna be into puppet.
- It talks way too much about boto (a Python AWS library), which is great if you're into it, and again, a waste if you're not.
As somebody who would not use Puppet and who wouldn't use Python/Boto either, that's just a what of wasted space on ideas I don't care about and a missed opportunity to see how those things would have been done in the absence of those tools.
When the authors use an example of how to use bits of AWS, they either go for an overly complicated real setup with something like Mezzanine CMS (who outside of the Django community has even heard about it?) or an even more complicated abstract setup ("here's what you can do for a very resilient PostgreSQL, but we're just gonna give you keywords and vague descriptions, not actually something you can run"). I feel they should have kept examples much simpler. And that if they wanted to stick to more complicated examples, at least they should have given you a bunch of working CloudFormation stacks and walked you through them.
Anyway, I got something out of this book, but it feels I could have gotten the same thing from a book 1/3 the size. It definitely does not feel like the best book on AWS.
First and foremost, it's already dated. There's a second edition coming in 2022 that may solve this issue, but that remains to be seen.
Second, and more importantly, it's all over the place with its examples.
- It talks way too much about puppet, which is great if you're into puppet, and wasteful if you know you're never gonna be into puppet.
- It talks way too much about boto (a Python AWS library), which is great if you're into it, and again, a waste if you're not.
As somebody who would not use Puppet and who wouldn't use Python/Boto either, that's just a what of wasted space on ideas I don't care about and a missed opportunity to see how those things would have been done in the absence of those tools.
When the authors use an example of how to use bits of AWS, they either go for an overly complicated real setup with something like Mezzanine CMS (who outside of the Django community has even heard about it?) or an even more complicated abstract setup ("here's what you can do for a very resilient PostgreSQL, but we're just gonna give you keywords and vague descriptions, not actually something you can run"). I feel they should have kept examples much simpler. And that if they wanted to stick to more complicated examples, at least they should have given you a bunch of working CloudFormation stacks and walked you through them.
Anyway, I got something out of this book, but it feels I could have gotten the same thing from a book 1/3 the size. It definitely does not feel like the best book on AWS.
June 16, 2019
Before reading this book, I had only vague notions of what AWS had to offer. Now I actually use AWS for work, which is awsome. I almost gave it 5 stars, but there is too much Puppet related info in there that IMHO are not required. Especially if you're not using Puppet. On the other hand, if you use Puppet, then you'll be quite happy. A clear read if you'd like to leverage AWS.
June 23, 2019
The book is very interesting with great links to resources. The information is laied in very catchy way. I liked the IAM tricks most. I was thinking of giving 5 stars, but puppet modules for AWS and building ELK stack while such a service exists is what I conceptually did not like.
Edit: I reread the book, puppet modules make sense now.
Edit: I reread the book, puppet modules make sense now.
November 12, 2015
Very easy to read and filled with concepts and examples. Sadly, many of those examples are more focused in Python scripts or Puppet modules rather than AWS CLI, which would have made this book a 5-stars book.
January 4, 2019
Read a prepublished version. There were some graphics errors but it seems promising.
June 10, 2015
This book was not for me. While it provided good coverage of the AWS components, I found it crowded with unhelpful code examples, especially around Puppet, and short of clarifying discussions. For example, I wanted to write CloudFormation stacks to set up access for development environments at work. After reading the initial chapters, I was left with a very incomplete and unhelpful view that I could do this by crafting and matching on ARNs. It took a huge amount of trial and error to undo this mistaken view and come to another solution. The book could have helped with this if it had been more interested in talking about the details of implementation patterns.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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