AWS For Admins For Dummies. Mueller John Paul

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Foolish Assumptions

      You might find it difficult to believe that I’ve assumed anything about you – after all, I haven’t even met you yet! Although most assumptions are indeed foolish, I made certain assumptions to provide a starting point for the book.

      The first assumption is that you’re familiar with the platform you want to use, because the book doesn’t provide any guidance in this regard. This book doesn’t discuss any platform-specific issues. You really do need to know how to install applications, use applications, and generally work with your chosen platform before you begin working with this book.

      You also need to be familiar with your browser and understand how to interact with browser-based applications. Sprinkled throughout are numerous references to online material that will enhance your learning experience. In addition, most of the tasks you perform with AWS require that you work in your browser.

      This book is pretty much platform independent. However, none of the procedures are tested using small mobile devices, such as a smartphone (and some are almost guaranteed not to work on a small device). Differences in appearance will emerge when using a smaller device – that is, a control that appears as a button on a larger device could appear as a link or other control on a smaller device. You need access to the sort of setup that an administrator will use to create and configure online setups, which means a larger tablet, notebook, or, better yet, a full desktop system. The various individuals working on this book used desktop systems running the Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms using a number of common browsers.

Icons Used in This Book

      As you read this book, you encounter icons in the margins that indicate material of special interest (or not, as the case may be!). Here’s what the icons mean:

      

Tips are nice because they help you save time or perform some task without a lot of extra work. The tips in this book are time-saving techniques or pointers to resources that you should try so that you can get the maximum benefit when performing AWS-related tasks.

      

I don’t want to sound like an angry parent or some kind of maniac, but you should avoid doing anything that’s marked with a Warning icon. Otherwise, you might find that your configuration fails to work as expected, you get incorrect results from seemingly bulletproof processes, or (in the worst-case scenario) you lose data.

      

Whenever you see this icon, think advanced tip or technique. You might find these tidbits of useful information just too boring for words, or they could contain the solution you need to get an AWS service running. Skip these bits of information whenever you like.

      

If you don’t get anything else out of a particular chapter or section, remember the material marked by this icon. This text usually contains an essential process or a bit of information that you must know to work with AWS, or to perform cloud-based-setup tasks successfully.

Beyond the Book

      This book isn’t the end of your AWS learning experience – it’s really just the beginning. I provide online content to make this book more flexible and better able to meet your needs. That way, as I receive email from you, I can address questions and tell you how updates to AWS or its associated add-ons affect book content. In fact, you gain access to these cool additions:

      ❯❯ Cheat sheet: You remember using crib notes in school to make a better mark on a test, don’t you? You do? Well, a cheat sheet is sort of like that. It provides you with some special notes about tasks that you can do with AWS that not every other person knows. You can find the cheat sheet for this book by going to www.dummies.com and searching AWS For Admins For Dummies Cheat Sheet. The cheat sheet contains really neat information such as figuring out which service you want to use.

      ❯❯ Also, check out the blog posts with answers to reader questions and demonstrations of useful book-related techniques at http://blog.johnmuellerbooks.com/.

Where to Go from Here

      It’s time to start your AWS adventure! If you’re completely new to AWS, you should start with Chapter 1 and progress through the book at a pace that allows you to absorb as much of the material as possible. Chapter 2 is especially important because it helps you understand what Amazon means by free-tier services. You should also read Chapter 3, even if you have experience with AWS, because it provides information about the services discussed in the book.

      Readers who have some exposure to AWS can move directly to Chapter 4. You can always go back to earlier chapters as necessary when you have questions. However, you do need to understand how each technique works before moving to the next one. Every technique and procedure has important lessons for you, and you could miss vital content if you start skipping too much information.

      Part 1

      Getting Started with AWS

      IN THIS PART …

      Get started with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

      Understand the AWS free tier.

      Get an overview of the various AWS services.

      Decide which of the AWS services your organization needs.

Chapter 1

      Starting Your AWS Adventure

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      ❯❯ Considering the AWS cloud environment

      ❯❯ Defining Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

      ❯❯ Specifying a need for AWS

      ❯❯ Getting an AWS-related certification

      ❯❯ Rounding out your education

      Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out as a tiny bit of software that enabled people to perform a limited number of tasks directly on Amazon, such as querying a product, placing a product request, or checking on an order status. The initial service didn’t do much, but people loved it, so it grew and then kept growing. Today, AWS is a huge web service, so big that it’s nearly impossible for anyone to explore it fully. It performs all sorts of tasks that don’t even relate to buying and selling products. In fact, the buying and selling of products is more of a sideline today as people use AWS more for computing services of all types (things like data storage and running applications). The purpose of this chapter is to help you understand what makes AWS special – namely, those services that administrators are most likely to get excited about. The chapter doesn’t cover many of the services because AWS is simply too large. For example, the chapter doesn’t cover much about services that are specifically designed to meet developer needs.

      Part of making AWS small enough to understand is to define the AWS environment. For such an understanding, you need to know a little about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). You don’t delve too deeply into these topics in this chapter, but you do gain enough information to understand how the AWS environment meets specific administration needs.

      After you gain an understanding of how AWS works, you need to consider how to actually use it to perform useful work. As organizations continue to downsize IT, administrators must become more efficient, and AWS has a lot to offer in that regard. In fact, even if you look only at the administrator-related services, you’re likely to find the number of services nearly overwhelming. This chapter helps you make sense of how you might use various services to meet specific needs in your organization.

      Even though you can use AWS quite well without a certification, obtaining an AWS certification will