What do you think?
Rate this book
Amazon Web Services in Action
Summary Amazon Web Services in Action introduces you to computing, storing, and networking in the AWS cloud. The book will teach you about the most important services on AWS. You will also learn about best practices regarding automation, security, high availability, and scalability. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Physical data centers require lots of equipment and take time and resources to manage. If you need a data center, but don't want to build your own, Amazon Web Services may be your solution. Whether you're analyzing real-time data, building software as a service, or running an e-commerce site, AWS offers you a reliable cloud-based platform with services that scale. All services are controllable via an API which allows you to automate your infrastructure. About the Book Amazon Web Services in Action introduces you to computing, storing, and networking in the AWS cloud. The book will teach you about the most important services on AWS. You will also learn about best practices regarding security, high availability and scalability.You'll start with a broad overview of cloud computing and AWS and learn how to spin-up servers manually and from the command line. You'll learn how to automate your infrastructure by programmatically calling the AWS API to control every part of AWS. You will be introduced to the concept of Infrastructure as Code with the help of AWS CloudFormation.You will learn about different approaches to deploy applications on AWS. You'll also learn how to secure your infrastructure by isolating networks, controlling traffic and managing access to AWS resources. Next, you'll learn options and techniques for storing your data. You will experience how to integrate AWS services into your own applications by the use of SDKs. Finally, this book teaches you how to design for high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability. What's Inside About the Reader Written for developers and DevOps engineers moving distributed applications to the AWS platform. About the Authors Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig are software engineers and consultants focused on AWS and web development. Table of Contents
397 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2015
75 people are currently reading
384 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
December 12, 2016
I could barely reach the end of this book. I have hardly seen any book that was so boring to read. Most of the book’s CF examples didn’t work for me. Not to mention that some of the services this book is describing have evolved so much that this book will do you more harm than good if you’ll start using those services based on the book.
Apart from the last 4 chapters I reckon that this book could help you quickly brush up your AWS skills.
The last 4 chapters are still relevant. Even though I’d love to see more emphasis on Elastic BeansTalk, as well as it’s a great pity that though the authors have mentioned AWS Lambda&Gateway API that’d preferred to simply ignore it since it wasn’t available in all regions at the time.
Apart from the last 4 chapters I reckon that this book could help you quickly brush up your AWS skills.
The last 4 chapters are still relevant. Even though I’d love to see more emphasis on Elastic BeansTalk, as well as it’s a great pity that though the authors have mentioned AWS Lambda&Gateway API that’d preferred to simply ignore it since it wasn’t available in all regions at the time.
November 22, 2015
A tough nut to crack. Why so?
The title promises a lot - AWS is incredibly spacious, consists of so many evolving services that it's not possible to cover all of them or even the most interesting ones in detailed form in a book, regardless of its size. And obviously this book doesn't do that - it covers basics of EC2, EBS, S3, RDS, even some SQS (veeery briefly) and that's all. Recent stuff like Lambda gets just mentioned & that's all. But - this seems sufficient if you're really fresh with AWS in general (in my case - I was dealing mainly with Azure & Heroku before), ESPECIALLY due to the fact that the deployment (Ops-ish) part was described VERY well.
Book's greatest CON except of its limited perspective on AWS? Even if it covers just the most popular services, they keep evolving as well - I'm afraid that after a year this book won't be worth its price & rating should drop at least by 1 star. Ya know - cloud is a cloud, isn't it?
The title promises a lot - AWS is incredibly spacious, consists of so many evolving services that it's not possible to cover all of them or even the most interesting ones in detailed form in a book, regardless of its size. And obviously this book doesn't do that - it covers basics of EC2, EBS, S3, RDS, even some SQS (veeery briefly) and that's all. Recent stuff like Lambda gets just mentioned & that's all. But - this seems sufficient if you're really fresh with AWS in general (in my case - I was dealing mainly with Azure & Heroku before), ESPECIALLY due to the fact that the deployment (Ops-ish) part was described VERY well.
Book's greatest CON except of its limited perspective on AWS? Even if it covers just the most popular services, they keep evolving as well - I'm afraid that after a year this book won't be worth its price & rating should drop at least by 1 star. Ya know - cloud is a cloud, isn't it?
June 17, 2019
Pros:
- a great book for quick AWS feature review
- has some practical lessons
Cons:
- outdated. There is no any information about new services e.g. Fargate or EKS
- huge walls of AWS-unrelated code (author really could place it on github/bitbucket)
- almost no information about AWS gotchas
- no information at all about S3 security (which is crucial IMO)
- a great book for quick AWS feature review
- has some practical lessons
Cons:
- outdated. There is no any information about new services e.g. Fargate or EKS
- huge walls of AWS-unrelated code (author really could place it on github/bitbucket)
- almost no information about AWS gotchas
- no information at all about S3 security (which is crucial IMO)
September 30, 2016
Covers a bunch of services, auto-scaling, HA/fault-tolerance. Much of it assumes no prior AWS experience so it's interesting to see where my previous setups have differed.
I could've used more info on IAM automation but AWS is a pretty big topic, so not enough room for everything. Lots and lots of CloudFormation examples (which I mostly skimmed since I'm using terraform for now).
I could've used more info on IAM automation but AWS is a pretty big topic, so not enough room for everything. Lots and lots of CloudFormation examples (which I mostly skimmed since I'm using terraform for now).
March 16, 2016
between 3 & 4 stars. Sometimes too easy - for people never heard about AWS...
July 7, 2020
A fairly standard "patterns"/"step-wise" instructional text on implementing common web-based business use-cases via AWS, and more broadly, cloud-computing as a concept. Similar to something like an "O'Reilly" book, these texts usually are very similar to online docs, but often much better communication/instruction, and often provides more detailed examples etc.
This book in particular, uses a simple example of hosting a WordPress blog for a business as the motivating business-case for exploration on various components within the AWS infrastructure. The text will goes fairly granular on how to build out that hosting infrastructure, including a basic, but thorough explanation of IAM (Internet Identity Management), host-side security services and protocols, and various cloud-computing concepts that supports these notions, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which is one of the primary organizational concepts that informs the way the various appleets and tools are organized within AWS.
In particular, the book will often come back to issues of traffic and software management under load, and how to control variability to one's site by using things like load-balancers. On the data-side, the book covers fairly well the concepts of general object stores, like S3, both RDS and Amazon's mainline NoSQL DB, Dynamo, and the various Elastic-services, like beanstalk & cache.
I didn't follow through the examples in real time, and will have to definitely update my review after going through some of these, most of which can be executed and processed via the free-service (according to the book). To fully get something out of this book, it's almost good to "be ready" to put code-to-metal, and use the text as a troubleshooting/instruction manual.
From a prereq standpoint, the user should be somewhat familiar with cloud-computing concepts, as well as how to run/execute virtual machines, and their standard use-cases. Further, having familiarity with the two mainline Linux distros, RedHat & Ubuntu is a must, as command-line interactions is critical to get an efficient workflow setup in AWS. Overall, nothing to complain about, I suspect this is more of a "intro" book to Cloud for business. Though, novices will probably get some things out of this as well, especially with some of the more detailed patterns around traffic/data management and leveraging assets like CDNs for static objects on your site. Conditional recommendation for intro/novices.
This book in particular, uses a simple example of hosting a WordPress blog for a business as the motivating business-case for exploration on various components within the AWS infrastructure. The text will goes fairly granular on how to build out that hosting infrastructure, including a basic, but thorough explanation of IAM (Internet Identity Management), host-side security services and protocols, and various cloud-computing concepts that supports these notions, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which is one of the primary organizational concepts that informs the way the various appleets and tools are organized within AWS.
In particular, the book will often come back to issues of traffic and software management under load, and how to control variability to one's site by using things like load-balancers. On the data-side, the book covers fairly well the concepts of general object stores, like S3, both RDS and Amazon's mainline NoSQL DB, Dynamo, and the various Elastic-services, like beanstalk & cache.
I didn't follow through the examples in real time, and will have to definitely update my review after going through some of these, most of which can be executed and processed via the free-service (according to the book). To fully get something out of this book, it's almost good to "be ready" to put code-to-metal, and use the text as a troubleshooting/instruction manual.
From a prereq standpoint, the user should be somewhat familiar with cloud-computing concepts, as well as how to run/execute virtual machines, and their standard use-cases. Further, having familiarity with the two mainline Linux distros, RedHat & Ubuntu is a must, as command-line interactions is critical to get an efficient workflow setup in AWS. Overall, nothing to complain about, I suspect this is more of a "intro" book to Cloud for business. Though, novices will probably get some things out of this as well, especially with some of the more detailed patterns around traffic/data management and leveraging assets like CDNs for static objects on your site. Conditional recommendation for intro/novices.
March 9, 2017
Hands on cloud computing, informative, fun, from zero to deploying fault tollerant web applications.
The book is well worth the money. And a lot of fun.
I don't think you'll ever get a book that covers everything Amazon has to offer, but if you want a book that will take you through the basics and a good chunk more then Amazon Web Services in Action is super. It'll get you to the point that you're really deploying fault tollerant web apps - (and I mean doing it, not just reading about it).
I covered the material over a few months - taking time to play along the way, and taking the odd detour into AWS dcoumentation when something caught my attention
I had some experience with openstack before picking up the book but I think you could just as easily start with no cloud knowledge. I had zero AWS knowledge before picking the book up.
The good:
* Very hands on
* Well written - to the point, simple
* Manning provide you the ebook for free if you buy the print copy (I did and am glad I have both)
* Basically everything hands on is covered by the AWS free tier - so you can play your way through the examples on AWS yourself at no cost!. Massive plus point!
The Bad:
* you're going to have to tell me - I loved it
* Seriously - It covers the basics (note: AWS basics are still huge), so no containers. no lambda etc. So maybe not the book for you if you want to talk microservices and serverless architectures.
I found it to be a very, very good stepping stone into AWS.
Would I recommend it: If anyone comes to me and asks for a starter book for AWS I'll point them to Amazon Web Services in Action without a second thought.
Seriously, I am always reluctant to give out 5 stars for a book but I'm struggling to justify not doing it here.
The book is well worth the money. And a lot of fun.
I don't think you'll ever get a book that covers everything Amazon has to offer, but if you want a book that will take you through the basics and a good chunk more then Amazon Web Services in Action is super. It'll get you to the point that you're really deploying fault tollerant web apps - (and I mean doing it, not just reading about it).
I covered the material over a few months - taking time to play along the way, and taking the odd detour into AWS dcoumentation when something caught my attention
I had some experience with openstack before picking up the book but I think you could just as easily start with no cloud knowledge. I had zero AWS knowledge before picking the book up.
The good:
* Very hands on
* Well written - to the point, simple
* Manning provide you the ebook for free if you buy the print copy (I did and am glad I have both)
* Basically everything hands on is covered by the AWS free tier - so you can play your way through the examples on AWS yourself at no cost!. Massive plus point!
The Bad:
* you're going to have to tell me - I loved it
* Seriously - It covers the basics (note: AWS basics are still huge), so no containers. no lambda etc. So maybe not the book for you if you want to talk microservices and serverless architectures.
I found it to be a very, very good stepping stone into AWS.
Would I recommend it: If anyone comes to me and asks for a starter book for AWS I'll point them to Amazon Web Services in Action without a second thought.
Seriously, I am always reluctant to give out 5 stars for a book but I'm struggling to justify not doing it here.
November 14, 2017
Pros:
Detailed instructions. Lucid diagrams. The authors have put in work explaining the intricacies of the building blocks of various AWS services diagrammatically, and it's greatly helpful. A great reference work. I liked the images a lot.
Cons:
With AWS constantly evolving, a lot of the instructions (e.g. OpsWorks works very differently now, as of Oct 2017, compared to what's shown in the book, and the --query in the commands never worked for me) tend to get stale/obsolete very quickly by the time someone has a chance to read them in the book. Also every structure or policy on AWS can apparently be described as a JSON, but the book doesn't talk about where to get/learn the structure or the 'keys' and most values allowed in said JSONs. Most of the corresponding JSONs are presented as magic to the reader. The reference work is bound to get outdated as AWS evolves. As a piece of literature it's got the dryness that you'd expect from a book that is basically cataloging how you can work with a bunch of online services. Also barely touches on SQS, Lambda, and API Gateway, which are the modern ways of doing things on AWS.
Detailed instructions. Lucid diagrams. The authors have put in work explaining the intricacies of the building blocks of various AWS services diagrammatically, and it's greatly helpful. A great reference work. I liked the images a lot.
Cons:
With AWS constantly evolving, a lot of the instructions (e.g. OpsWorks works very differently now, as of Oct 2017, compared to what's shown in the book, and the --query in the commands never worked for me) tend to get stale/obsolete very quickly by the time someone has a chance to read them in the book. Also every structure or policy on AWS can apparently be described as a JSON, but the book doesn't talk about where to get/learn the structure or the 'keys' and most values allowed in said JSONs. Most of the corresponding JSONs are presented as magic to the reader. The reference work is bound to get outdated as AWS evolves. As a piece of literature it's got the dryness that you'd expect from a book that is basically cataloging how you can work with a bunch of online services. Also barely touches on SQS, Lambda, and API Gateway, which are the modern ways of doing things on AWS.
May 18, 2021
Es un gran libro para quién este iniciando en el tema de computación en la nube y todos los servicios que están alrededor, claro enfocado al lÃder actual de los servicios AWS. Ya que es un libro para personas que están iniciando no se ven servicios avanzados de aws, como inteligencia artificial, solo esencial para poder trabajar con los servicios que ofrece aws para hacer despliegues de aplicaciones web en la nube.
Con respecto al contenido, explica muy bien como funcionan el API de AWS y como es que se pueden acceder a todos los servicios, que era algo que me tenÃa muy confundido. Adicionalmente, la explicación que qué es el cache y las formas de implementarlo es de las mejores con la que me he encontrado.
Los ejercicios que plantean son bastante entretenidos, pero es necesario tener un conocimiento medio de javascript, python y yaml. No son complejos pero es necesario darle mucho enfoque a la configuración que se está explicando. Un tip para quien lea este libro en electrónico es leerlo en landscape ya que los ejercicios estan formateados de forma en que sigue formato de yaml y tenerlo en portrait view hace muy difÃcil seguir los ejercicios.
Con respecto al contenido, explica muy bien como funcionan el API de AWS y como es que se pueden acceder a todos los servicios, que era algo que me tenÃa muy confundido. Adicionalmente, la explicación que qué es el cache y las formas de implementarlo es de las mejores con la que me he encontrado.
Los ejercicios que plantean son bastante entretenidos, pero es necesario tener un conocimiento medio de javascript, python y yaml. No son complejos pero es necesario darle mucho enfoque a la configuración que se está explicando. Un tip para quien lea este libro en electrónico es leerlo en landscape ya que los ejercicios estan formateados de forma en que sigue formato de yaml y tenerlo en portrait view hace muy difÃcil seguir los ejercicios.
August 11, 2019
I didn't realize what a difficult book to write this one was until I was reading it. It sometimes feels like it goes deep on subjects that are not core to AWS and sometimes it feels like it's skipping subjects. I'm guessing this is because it depends a lot on the knowledge you already have. For example, I've been administering Linux for 20 years, I don't need to be explained how to keep a Linux box up to date. But someone else might be experiencing that for the first time. It's an impossible balance.
I think this book will need to be updated soon to cover Kubernetes and Docker and hard choices about how deep to go will be made again, as both of those are worth a book by themselves.
Overall, I think it was a good introduction to AWS and it allows you to get an understanding of what's in the toolbox, how and when you should use it and what you want to go deeper into.
If you are an experienced sysadmin, don't hesitate to skip parts that seem superfluous to you. I did that and I never found myself needing to go back to review.
I think this book will need to be updated soon to cover Kubernetes and Docker and hard choices about how deep to go will be made again, as both of those are worth a book by themselves.
Overall, I think it was a good introduction to AWS and it allows you to get an understanding of what's in the toolbox, how and when you should use it and what you want to go deeper into.
If you are an experienced sysadmin, don't hesitate to skip parts that seem superfluous to you. I did that and I never found myself needing to go back to review.
September 6, 2020
The book is well written and the great value comes in Part 4: Architecting on AWS. I agree that the scope of the book (given its title) is broader than just talking about architecture, but the elaboration on each service offered by AWS that are described in the book, can be better (and deeper) understood by AWS docs. I don't want to be unfair on this subject so once again, the initial chapters are important so the authors can talk about architecting on AWS.
Another thing that I found a bit annoying was that all the examples are given using CloudFormation. In my particular case, I'm not interested in learning CloudFormation so it might be a matter of taste though.
In my opinion the authors could have written differently by presenting services while describing interesting architectures whilst the examples would give an overview of many different services as it was not the intent to go deeper on each one of them.
Another thing that I found a bit annoying was that all the examples are given using CloudFormation. In my particular case, I'm not interested in learning CloudFormation so it might be a matter of taste though.
In my opinion the authors could have written differently by presenting services while describing interesting architectures whilst the examples would give an overview of many different services as it was not the intent to go deeper on each one of them.
August 24, 2020
Very well laid out. Concepts are clearly explained, without diving too much into the technical quirks. Examples are long and well explained, both with words and plenty of colorful schemas. While not real world scenarios, they are still much better than the typical hello world piece of code.
The choice of topics is good but, to be honest, only for someone who is beginning his way into AWS. Do not expect anything like EMR clusters talking to Redshift through S3. Each service is tackled as a standelone, or almost.
Not only that, while it is true that the examples are interesting, they do not show the pitfalls you can face. A simple example: eventual consistency with DynamoDB.
So overall, not a bad book at all but I would love to see other, more advanced and real like scenarios.
The choice of topics is good but, to be honest, only for someone who is beginning his way into AWS. Do not expect anything like EMR clusters talking to Redshift through S3. Each service is tackled as a standelone, or almost.
Not only that, while it is true that the examples are interesting, they do not show the pitfalls you can face. A simple example: eventual consistency with DynamoDB.
So overall, not a bad book at all but I would love to see other, more advanced and real like scenarios.
May 28, 2021
Well, this one didn't age well! I guess I should have known better... Manning's In Action books are usually beginner-level and this one isn't any different - it covers several mainstream AWS services superficially (in less detail than you can find in the official docs books released by Amazon) as it builds/deploys a WordPress website with some Node.js backend examples. Having worked with pretty much all of the services showcased here, I can advise anyone reading this review to skip this book if they have any experience in the technologies covered within.
September 8, 2017
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to pick up AWS from scratch and the best practices.
The book is structured in a very logical way and would guide you through the steps to get up and running with AWS following best practices. Rating the book with 4 stars as "In Action" you work with AWS a bit differently, at least today. The book is still highly relevant, even though it doesn't cover some of the latest and greatest AWS services, such as CodeDeploy, AWS Lambda, API Gateway.
The book is structured in a very logical way and would guide you through the steps to get up and running with AWS following best practices. Rating the book with 4 stars as "In Action" you work with AWS a bit differently, at least today. The book is still highly relevant, even though it doesn't cover some of the latest and greatest AWS services, such as CodeDeploy, AWS Lambda, API Gateway.
June 4, 2017
Good start in fundamental AWS offerings such as EC2 & DynamoDB from a developer's perspective but given the book was published in 2014 it by now (2017 at the time of writing this) is not up-to-date with the latest product offers in AWS.
December 12, 2019
Good book. Got a ton of new things and terms about AWS after reading this book. However, if you need deeper knowledge on AWS, let find another book with specific topic - e.g. Serverless, CloudFormation, etc.
August 9, 2020
It's a decent book to get introduced to AWS at a 30,000 foot view but because of how quickly AWS changes and grows, it already doesn't work all that well in unison with practical, hands-on application of the principles.
June 13, 2017
Great technical resource for AWS engineers especially enjoyed the Cloud Formation section.
June 17, 2017
God book if don't want to read different docs in different places. Also contains some very useful boilerplate scripts.
August 18, 2017
A good introduction in the most common AWS services.
September 29, 2017
Not bad!
August 7, 2018
The beginning few chapters were informative, the chapters at the end tried to squeeze in too much code, it reads more like a code recipe than actually teaching the reader about more aws services.
June 6, 2019
Seems decent. Made the mistake of buying the first edition. Still very relevant and great explanations!
May 31, 2020
quite boring... I picked it just to refresh the stuff, but it was a mistake...
January 17, 2021
Decent overview of the services. Well organized.
March 15, 2021
A very good book for quick introduction to AWS, very simple and direct. Good one
June 19, 2021
I was looking for an advanced overview of AWS but this book is mainly an introduction and tutorial around its principal services with 1/5 of the book being CloudFormation templates.
April 24, 2022
Helpful references when working through the basics of AWS. Used this in addition to Cloud Guru.
January 18, 2017
Amazon Web Services in Action is an excellent entry-level introduction book to Amazon AWS. It describes and solves a lot of "What AWS can do ..." questions and also provided the answers to the "How" questions with detailed examples you can actually practice using the AWS account free tier and get your hands dirty.
However, if you have already experiences and are pretty familiar with server virtualization (virtual CPU, memory and disk; virtual network, etc.), Linux system administration (shell, software installation and configuration, system upgrade, etc), and networking setups, you can probably skip the step-by-step instructions in this book, and use AWS's very intuitive Web interface to finish your setup.
So far I am happy with reading most of the contents and it gives me solid picture on the whole AWS features. I will keep reading this book until finishing the last chapter to complete my knowledge about AWS.
However, if you have already experiences and are pretty familiar with server virtualization (virtual CPU, memory and disk; virtual network, etc.), Linux system administration (shell, software installation and configuration, system upgrade, etc), and networking setups, you can probably skip the step-by-step instructions in this book, and use AWS's very intuitive Web interface to finish your setup.
So far I am happy with reading most of the contents and it gives me solid picture on the whole AWS features. I will keep reading this book until finishing the last chapter to complete my knowledge about AWS.
February 19, 2016
Great high level overview of what is AWS and a good introduction to cloud
Examples are all working and simple enough to be run during the reading.
However, this is merely an introduction to AWS. That is because usually, most CloudFormation templates are already done.
Doing your own highly available systems would require you to go deep inside AWS documentation or other books
So while it does not make anyone a AWS expert, it is complete enough for most readers to be able to go deeper by themselves after that
Examples are all working and simple enough to be run during the reading.
However, this is merely an introduction to AWS. That is because usually, most CloudFormation templates are already done.
Doing your own highly available systems would require you to go deep inside AWS documentation or other books
So while it does not make anyone a AWS expert, it is complete enough for most readers to be able to go deeper by themselves after that
Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.