Preface

With an increasing interest in leveraging cloud infrastructure around the world, the AWS cloud from Amazon offers a cutting-edge platform for architecting, building, and deploying web-scale cloud applications through a user-friendly interface. The variety of features available within AWS can reduce overall infrastructure costs and accelerate the development process for both large enterprises and start-ups alike.

Learning AWS covers basic, intermediate, and advanced features and concepts as they relate to designing, developing, and deploying scalable, highly available, and secure applications on the AWS platform. By sequentially working through the steps in each chapter, you will quickly master the features of AWS to create an enterprise-grade cloud application. We use a three-tiered services-oriented sample application for extensive hands-on exercises.

This book will not only teach you about the AWS components, but you will gain valuable information about key concepts such as multi-tenancy, auto scaling, planning, implementing application development environments, addressing application security concerns, and so on. You will also learn how these concepts relate to cost effective architectural decisions while designing scalable, highly available, and secure AWS cloud applications.

A step-by-step approach to cloud application design and implementation is explained in a conversational and easy-to-follow style. Each topic is explained sequentially in the process of creating an AWS cloud application. Detailed explanations of the basic and advanced features of AWS that address the needs of readers with a wide range of real-world experiences are also included. Expert programmers and architects will appreciate the focus on the practice rather than the theory.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Cloud 101 – Understanding the Basics, describes basic cloud concepts including the public, private, and hybrid cloud models. We explain and compare the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud service delivery models. In addition, we explain multi-tenancy models and the challenges they present in design, implementation, and operations.

Chapter 2, Designing Cloud Applications – An Architect's Perspective, describes familiar and not-so familiar architectural best practices in the cloud context. These include designing a multi-tier architecture and designing for multi-tenancy, scalability, and availability. We will also guide you through the process of estimating your cloud computing costs.

Chapter 3, AWS Components, Cost Model, and Application Development Environments, introduces you to the AWS components—EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS Queues, SNS, and so on. We will discuss strategies to lower your AWS infrastructure costs and their implications on architectural decisions. We will explain the typical characteristics of the Development, QA, Staging, and Production environments on the AWS cloud.

Chapter 4, Designing for and Implementing Scalability, provides guidance on how to define your scalability objectives, and then discusses the design and implementation of specific strategies to achieve scalability.

Chapter 5, Designing for and Implementing High Availability, provides guidance on how to define your availability objectives, discuss the nature of failures, and then discuss the design and implementation of specific strategies to achieve high availability. In addition, we will describe the approaches that leverage the AWS features and services for your Disaster Recovery planning.

Chapter 6, Designing for and Implementing Security, provides guidance on how to define security objectives, explains your security responsibilities, and then discusses the implementations of specific best practices for application security.

Chapter 7, Deploying to Production and Going Live, provides guidance on managing infrastructure, deployments, support, and operations for your cloud application. In addition, we provide some tips on planning your production Go-Live activities.

What you need for this book

You will need your standard development machine with Spring Tool Suite (STS), Maven, the Git command line tools, the MySQL database, and an Amazon account to complete the hands-on sections in this book.

Who this book is for

This book is targeted at expert programmers/architects, who want to learn AWS. This book assumes that the reader has previously designed and developed multi-tiered applications, not necessarily on a cloud platform, but in an enterprise or a start-up setting. Some familiarity with Spring, MySQL, and RESTful web services is expected.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "This can be done via the command line from the root of the a1ecommerce project via a maven goal package."

A block of code is set as follows:

jdbc.url=jdbc:mysql:// a1ecommerce.cklrz1a88gdv.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:3306/a1ecommerceDba1ecommerceDba1ecommerceDb #Endpoint of AmazonAmazonAmazon RDS
jdbc.username=a1dbroot # username of Amazon DB instance
jdbc.password=a1dbroot #Password for the Amazon DB instance

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sudo apt-get update;
sudo apt-get install tomcat7 mysql-client-5.6;

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "From the RDS dashboard, click on Instances in the navigation pane, and then on a1ecommerce to view the details of the DB instance."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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