Customer Reviews

Programming Amazon EC2

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Because this is a short book, I'll write a short review. Programming Amazon EC2 (PAE) explains how to use certain elements of Amazon Web Services to deploy applications in Amazon's cloud infrastructure. The discussion centers on the authors' experiences deploying live, production Web sites (like Kulitzer) using AWS. I found this approach refreshing and novel, because it reads like a playbook for recreating similar infrastructure for the reader's own purposes.

PAE regularly explains how to accomplish tasks using the AWS Web interface, but crucially (for me anyways) the book also generally shows the same processes using command line tools on Linux. Because I find it easier to read CLI instructions than follow screenshots of Web sites, I appreciated the text-based approach. PAE also helps the reader understand the reasoning behind Amazon's release of various AWS offerings. It's clearer now the problems Amazon was solving internally, which drove the delivery of new capabilities to customers.

My main problem with PAE is the almost total lack of security considerations. I say "almost" because the word "secure" does appear on p 87: "One advantage of SimpleDB here is that it's ready to use right away. There is no setup or administration hassle, the data is secure..." Sure it is! The authors also mention using Access Control Lists to permit Internet users to use Web applications, but otherwise there is no discussion of the risks of relying on cloud infrastructure. Reading recent news should be enough to remind the reader of these issues.

Overall, you will like PAE if you're looking to see how another small company jumpstarted their business by deploying applications in AWS. For future editions I would like to see discussions of security plus comparisons to other cloud offerings.

Programming Amazon EC2Programming Amazon EC2 is a hands-on guide to use of Amazon's cloud platform, with a focus on showing the reader how to approach the various components of the EC2 ecosystem. The authors state early on that the goal is to give the reader "a sense of all AWS functionality", so you will not find any one area explored in extreme detail.

The text generally achieves its goals. After a brief history of EC2 at Amazon, it moves quickly into establishing the necessary tools environment and then connecting to a new machine instance. This is not a cookbook, and some mundane yet critical details (e.g., setting permissions on your key files to 400 when running on Linux) are skipped; these are not fatal omissions, but they may hamper your experience if you are not seasoned on your platform of choice. Also, most examples are geared toward the Linux (Ubuntu) environment, so you will need to be able to translate those commands and concepts to your chosen environment. Once the machine image has booted, this text will assume that you are fully competent to administer the operating system of that image, including package installation, editing configuration files, etc.

Overall, good breadth of information in a relatively quick read, although you will need to follow along and try the examples with your chosen image/environment/application to really see a return on time invested.

Disclaimer, I was provided access by O'Reilly Publishing to an electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Great book for getting started developing on amazon ec2. It's a fast-read, giving a nice overview of all the different products amazon has to offer and how or when to use them. It also provides examples with code snippets on how automate some more complex tasks like scaling and making snapshots. Although this book is a very quick start for new Amazon ec2 users, I'm afraid it might get outdated quite fast since amazon continuously adds more features and new products to the mix and makes things easier.

Expecting a book with examples and insights, this book has given me all information I expected. You will read why certain services are made but also where they are most useful by given real-world examples. Between the lines you will get valuable tips about best practices/warnings. While planning to use Python the book focusses on Ruby/PHP/Java but still reading the code makes it clear enough what I will need to do in another programming language to make AWS work for me.

Well done writing, and these are the books you will need to get a good insight in new technology but is also useful while implementing ideas onto AWS!

Amazon Web Services is a vast ecosystem and Programming Amazon EC2 by Jurg van Vliet and Flavia Paganelli strikes a nice balance between explaining general concepts and providing practical coding examples. It's a great way to get started with EC2.

It can be daunting for newcomers to grasp how all the different parts of AWS fit together. The first part of the book introduces AWS and the basics of setting up an EC2 instance. Then it moves into how to scale with ELB and extra services like SQS, SNS, SimpleDB, and RBS. Finally, it goes into some practical discussions on how to monitor your system, improve uptime, and work with all the decoupled parts of your new system.

At the same time, the book doesn't try to provide an encyclopedic accounting for all of AWS, and it doesn't detail every little step to work with AWS. That's a good thing. The result is a good substance-to-page ratio. If you need a cookbook or step-by-step account of how to do things, there's always the Amazon docs. They will be more up-to-date anyway. Instead, the book goes for concepts, context, and useful coding examples in ruby, java, and php. The authors touch on AWS's console but also other tools, many of them, third-party, to help manage your app and provide examples of things like backup scripts.

AWS is so vast that there will be some parts of the book that readers have no interest in and other parts they wish had more detail. But for beginning and intermediate users, the book is a great reference to get up and working with AWS.

This book gives a great and broad overview of Amazon EC2. Even though It is a complex platform, it is explored in a straightforward and practical way. The most important services are explained with enough detail to quickly start trying them. Using as examples the web apps they've put in production, the book goes from an initial and simple deploy, then through scaling and load balancing, refactoring, decoupling and finally decreasing downtime and managing uptime efficiently.

One of the strongest points of this book is the authors' real-world usage of EC2: every recommendation, tip and best practice is based on day to day experience. While the web administration console is covered and used for some taks, many others are done with the command-line tools, as one would do with in a real production environment. When reading the scripts one can appreciate what is really going on. Some useful third party tools are also described.

Keep in mind that this text requires some technical background. You will not find here how to install or setup a Django or Rails environment from the ground up. But this is actually a good thing for people like me who already work with deployed apps and want to move them to the EC2.

The only downside to mention is not really the book's fault. EC2 is constantly being improved and new services are being added all the time, and third party tools and services are constantly popping up, so some sections can look incomplete in the future. A website for the book could be a good complement.

This is a great book to get you started with Amazon EC2. The authors obviously have a wealth of experience developing applications using Amazon EC2. I really enjoyed the fact that the book uses real-world examples as, according to the authors, "the only examples that are interesting". :).

Pro:

1. Real world example
2. Tightly structured, doesn't waste your time in less than 160 pages.
3. Easy to follow code samples


Con:

1. Omission of WIndows as a platform. Not all Windows developers will go for Azure. Azure as a platform does not have all the tools available to EC2. If you do not feel comfortable giving all controls to Azure Fabric Controller, EC2 is a better choice and it is worth addressing.
2. Omission of VPC. This is a very significant product to EC2, in my opinion. This is where your real datacenter meets the virtual.


Suggestion:

1. More network topics, for example:
a. VPC: A significant piece where real meets virtual.
b. Peering: If your app has significant amount of data that needs to move back-and-forth between AWS and your servers, peering is needed. A well-published success story, SmugMug, for example has serious implications on moving significant amount of data between SmugMug and AWS.
c. CloudFront: The book addresses CF as a distribution mechanism, which is correct. But I think it would be helpful to address the structure of CloudFront as compare to LimeLight, Akamai, and other CDN providers.
d. IPv6: when AWS starts to address IPv6, of course.
2. Address mobile platform integration with AWS. The authors has a lot of experience in the space, I think it would be interesting to the readers if they can address it as a project from start to finish.
3. Include the newer services like Route53 and Simple Email Services. Too new, but maybe include them in the next edition?

Programming Amazon EC2 is a very good book. It doesn't cover everything, but it helps you build and grow your application on the Amazon cloud.

The structure of the book has helped us understand how to approach moving to AWS. It prepared us for the challenges and opportunities AWS gives you. And more importantly, it gives sort of a template to grow your app with the services AWS offers.

It is chockfull of hands-on examples, but shown in context. It shows how to build single-instance infrastructures that are ready to fail, using images and EBS. After that it talks about the changes in the app necessary to prepare for autoscaling, and shows how to implement this. And in the end, it uses services like SQS and SimpleDB to decouple your growing application when traffic demands.

Even though there are core topics missing in this book (IAM, Windows), it is well worth the money. If we could we would have given 4.5 stars. In the end a practical book, with examples in context, has proven to be very valuable to us.

Before you get your hands into the Amazon Cloud, this book is a must read. This should be a required manual (or sorts) especially if you're thinking about skipping the free documentation available on the Amazon Web Services site.

Even before you buy this book, you can be sure that the author, Jurg van Vliet, knows AWS concepts very thoroughly because this author has also developed an iPhone and an Android app for AWS, called "Decaf". Decaf uses native AWS API calls to interact with your AWS account. Search for this author on YouTube and you'll find an interview describing this book.

This book may be slightly outdated now as the cloud space is constantly changing (read: improving). However, the core concepts around the EC2 that are covered in this book are still the same. This book gives you a great start into the core EC2 (and AWS) concepts that you must understand before you get started with EC2. For example, this book explains the differences between EBS-backed and S3-backed instances in such detail that I could not find in the EC2 documentation. This book also provides you details instructions on how to get the command-line tools set up.

A prerequisite for this book should be that you do need to have some basic understanding of programming and/or scripting. For this book (and for EC2 in general), you should also have some system administration experience (Linux or Windows). This book will not show you how to host your site on AWS but it will show you how to get started toward that goal. AWS is much more than a hosting solution so if you're only looking to host website, you may be disappointed by the contents of this book.

Currently this is the only book that covers AWS (and EC2 in particular) in this much depth. I have also read Jeff Barr's Host Your Web Site In The Cloud and if I had to pick one book out of the two, I would pick this Jurg van Vliet's book because it focuses more on EC2 and provides more in-depth coverage of topics that someone using the EC2 as utility computing will need.

The title of this book is slightly misleading because the book doesn't just cover EC2 exclusively. It goes into many of the other AWS services such as RDS, S3, CloudFront, Auto Scale, SQS, SimpleDB and SNS. I would have titled the book "Programming Amazon Web Services" because it doesn't just talk about EC2 which is just one of the many services within the AWS offering.

The authors do an excellent job on walking us through EC2. Highly recommended book, not too technical and not too simple either. It fills a needed gap in the market.