This is a necessary and essential guide to how to actually use AWS well, something that's hard to do made even harder by the baffling array of services, documentation and training available. A solid companion to the Open Guide to AWS :)

Thanks for writing this. Who is the intended audience for this book (technical competency, profession, etc.)?

Hey PH 👋 We're two ex-Amazon employees, now working independently for ourselves. Between the two of us, we've been using AWS for 15 years, including 11 years from inside Amazon. This is not your typical reference book. It doesn't cover all of AWS or all its quirks. Instead, we want to help you realize which AWS features you’d be foolish not to use. Features for which you almost never need to consider alternatives. We only cover topics we have significant first-hand experience with. You won't find most of the knowledge we share here in the AWS docs. Part 1: The Good Parts - The Default Heuristic - DynamoDB - S3 - EC2 - EC2 Auto Scaling - Lambda - ELB - CloudFormation - Route 53 - SQS - Kinesis The second part of the book is a detailed (140 page) step by step guide on how we set up our own web apps when we use AWS. Part 2: The Bootstrap Guide - Starting from Scratch - Infrastructure as Code - Automatic Deployments - Load Balancing - Scaling - Production - Custom Domains - HTTPS - Network Security If this interests you, it would be an honor for us to have you read it. 🙏 Thank You & Happy Holidays 🎄