This practical guide provides over 70 self-contained recipes to help you creatively solve common AWS challenges you'll encounter on your cloud journey. If you're comfortable with rudimentary scripting and general cloud concepts, this cookbook provides what you need to address foundational tasks and create high-level capabilities.

Authors John Culkin and Mike Zazon share real-world examples that incorporate best practices. Each recipe includes a diagram to visualize the components. Code is provided so that you can safely execute in an AWS account to ensure solutions work as described. From there, you can customize the code to help construct an application or fix an existing problem. Each recipe also includes a discussion to provide context, explain the approach, and challenge you to explore the possibilities further.

Go beyond theory and learn the details you need to successfully build on AWS. The recipes help you:

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  •  Redact personal identifiable information (PII) from text using Amazon Comprehend
• •  Automate password rotation for Amazon RDS databases
• •  Use VPC Reachability Analyzer to verify and troubleshoot network paths
• •  Lock down Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets
• •  Analyze AWS Identity and Access Management policies
• •  Auto scale a containerized service
  
  Who This Book Is For

This book is for developers, engineers, and architects of all levels, from beginner to expert. Beginners will learn cloud concepts and become comfortable working with cloud services. Experts will be able to examine code used to stand up recipe foundations, explore new services, and gain additional perspectives. If the plethora of cloud services and combinations seem overwhelming to you, then this book is for you. The recipes in this book aim to provide “Hello, World” proofs of concept and components of enterprise-grade applications. This will be accomplished using common use cases with guided walk-throughs of scenarios that you can directly apply to your current or future work. These curated and experience-building recipes are meant to demystify services and will immediately deliver value, regardless of your AWS experience level.

What You Will Learn

In addition to opening up new career opportunities, being able to harness the power of AWS will give you the ability to create powerful systems and applications that solve many interesting and demanding problems in our world today. Would you like to handle 60,000 cyber threats per second using AWS machine learning like Siemens does? Or reduce your organization’s on-premises footprint and expand its use of microservices like Capital One has? If so, the practical examples in this book will help expedite your learning by providing tangible examples showing how you can put the building blocks of AWS together to form practical solutions that address common scenarios. The on-demand consumption model, vast capacity, advanced capabilities, and global footprint of the cloud create new possibilities that need to be explored.

The Recipes
We break the book into chapters that focus on general areas of technology (e.g., security, networking, artificial intelligence, etc.). The recipes contained within the chapters are bite-sized, self-contained, and easily consumable. Recipes vary in length and complexity. Each recipe has a problem statement, solution (with diagram), and discussion. Problem statements are tightly defined to avoid confusion. Solutions contain required preparation and steps to walk you through the work needed to accomplish the goal. When appropriate, explicit validation checks will be provided. We’ve also added extra challenges to the recipes to help you advance your learning if you wish to do so. Finally, we end each recipe with a short discussion to help you understand the solution and why it matters, suggestions to extend the solution, and ways to utilize it for real impact.

Review

"With AWS, you can build your ideas. With this book, you can find easy to implement solutions to many common requirements in areas such as networking, security, and databases. By just scrolling through the table of contents, I had a few ideas on things to do to simplify some of my recurring activities and operations. The AI/ML section provides quick tips for using fully managed services to do things such as detecting text in a video. The account management includes some tips that you should look at if you have a production environment. A solid companion to improve the way you use AWS."
-- Danilo Poccia,
Chief Evangelist (EMEA) Amazon Web Services

"There's something sorely missing from official AWS documentation: a sense of reality. Most of us aren't attempting to win points for collecting as many AWS services as we can; we're trying to complete a task somewhere that isn't a whiteboard. AWS Cookbook speaks to real users with a collection of recipes and pragmatic examples we can all benefit from."
-- Corey Quinn,
Chief Cloud Economist, The Duckbill Group

"Inside you'll find a great deal of information on typical AWS use cases plus a reference implementation that's easy to follow. If you like to learn AWS concepts in a practice-driven, example-based, hands-on manner, I highly recommend this book."
-- Gaurav Raje,
author of Security and Microservice Architecture on AWS

"I've never read a book packed so densely with ninja level tips and tricks for AWS; it's the book I wish I had five years ago. If you use AWS day to day, you need this in your toolkit, not only for the things it contains but also for the inspiration it provides. In my view, it's the best AWS book there is."
-- Adrian Cantrill,
AWS Trainer, learn.cantrill.io

About the Author

John Culkin is a senior solutions architect at AWS. He holds all current AWS certifications. Previously, he was a principal cloud architect lead at Cloudreach, where he led the delivery of cloud solutions aligned with organizational needs. A lifelong student of technology, he now focuses on creating transformative business solutions that utilize cloud services.
 
Mike Zazon is a senior cloud architect at AWS, focused on helping enterprise customers modernize their businesses. He previously held roles as a cloud software developer, software engineer, software architect, IT manager, and data center architect. His passion for technology education blossomed while serving in some of these roles within an engineering research university setting.