AWS® For Admins For Dummies®

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      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954413

      ISBN 978-1-119-31248-2; ISBN 978-1-119-31250-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-31249-9 (ebk)

      Introduction

      Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out as a rather small undertaking that allowed a developer to create applications that queried all things Amazon. You could perform queries, obtain sales data, and even upload offerings for sale. However, the focus was on Amazon. That’s not the case today! Now you can manage an entire company using AWS. The offerings are varied, more than any one organization is likely to need, and the focus is no longer on Amazon, but on your company and your company’s needs.

      Of course, you might wonder why Amazon deserves special attention given that there are many other cloud providers (such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM) available today. According to a recent ComputerWorld article (http://www.computerworld.com/article/3102904/cloud-computing/four-us-companies-rule-the-worlds-cloud-infrastructure.html), Amazon currently owns 31 percent of the cloud computing market, which means that your organization stands to benefit from Amazon’s huge installed base of customer-tested services. According to CIO magazine, AWS is so popular that companies like Gartner that track statistics for it have had to change their charting methods just to keep AWS on the charts when compared to the competition. AWS For Admins For Dummies helps you understand not only why you need these services to remain competitive but also how to use them to gain the maximum effectiveness and efficiency for your organization.

      Following the progress of AWS over the years gives me a unique perspective of the services it offers today, which is why you need AWS For Admins For Dummies if your job is to administer your organization’s offerings and perform tasks like getting a cloud-based setup started. Just digging through the offerings and figuring out what you need is likely to prove daunting, which is why this book offers you clear-cut paths and helps you overcome the hype to do something useful in a short time.

      The purpose of AWS For Admins For Dummies is to help you figure out what you need and create a basic functional setup that enables you to become productive sooner than later. This book separates the programming aspects of AWS from the administrative aspects, so you don’t have to read reams of developer-specific information to find the one item you really need as an administrator. Of course, this book isn’t just for administrators, but for anyone who needs to get a basic AWS setup configured for any need. DevOps and developers can use this book as well, even though it does focus on administrative tasks.

      AWS For Admins For Dummies is designed to make things simple. That’s why it focuses on using the AWS consoles to perform tasks whenever possible and resorts to the command-line interface only when necessary. By following the procedures in this book, you can set up and configure a computing environment quickly and easily.

      This book also helps you separate hype from reality. The Amazon documentation would often have you believe that everything works perfectly in AWS, which clearly can’t happen. Every piece of software, even cloud software, has quirks and issues that you need to know about. Most important, this book helps you understand when moving to the cloud might be a bad idea because of a number of issues that even the media is less than thrilled to tell you about. Rather than be lured by the hype, you’ll be best served by knowing when a cloud environment actually does meet your needs, rather than set you up for problems at some point or, worse yet, prove useless.

      To help you absorb the concepts, this book uses the following conventions: