Three years ago, after finishing the writing of my first book, I said “Never again”. Well – never say never, because today I am happy to share the upcoming release of my second book “AWS for Systems Administrators – 2nd Edition”. The book, again published by packt, will be available at the end of May, 2025. You can find it on amazon.
Each chapter of the book covers a different service within AWS while paying particular attention to aspects like Infrastructure-as-Code and automation. We go from covering the basics of setting up an EC2 instance with CloudFormation to setting up organizational structures for multi-account setups with Terraform. In detail, the 17 chapters of the book cover:
- Chapter 1, Setting Up the AWS Environment, introduces you to the basics of setting up an account on AWS as well as the Infrastructure-as-Code tools we’ll use throughout this book: Terraform, CloudFormation, and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK).
- Chapter 2, Protecting your AWS Account using IAM, explains the concepts of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service that is used throughout AWS for authentication and authorization.
- Chapter 3, Creating a Data Center in the Cloud Using VPC, covers the basic networking concepts of the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – your “data center” in AWS.
- Chapter 4, Scalable Compute Capacity in the Cloud via EC2, looks at concepts of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – the AWS service to provision virtual machines within AWS.
- Chapter 5, Increasing application fault-tolerance and efficiency with Elastic Load Balancing, explains how we can use Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to route traffic between multiple instances to increase fault-tolerance and efficiency.
- Chapter 6, Increasing Application Performance Using AWS Auto Scaling, covers how we can use Auto Scaling Groups in AWS to automatically scale our compute up or down.
- Chapter 7, Scaling a relational database in the cloud using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), explains how to deploy an open source Postgres database using the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and explore the concept of managed services.
- Chapter 8, Storing secrets with AWS Secrets Manager and managing custom encryption keys with AWS KMS, teaches you how to handle secrets such as passwords or access tokens as well as the basic concepts of encryption in the cloud.
- Chapter 9, Monitoring AWS Services Using CloudWatch and SNS, explains how you can use CloudWatch and SNS for centralized logging, metrics and alerting on AWS.
- Chapter 10, Centralizing Cloud Backup Solutions, explains AWS Backup and how you can use this service to implement backup plans.
- Chapter 11, Disaster Recovery Options with AWS, explores the different options available to architect resilient applications on AWS. The chapter also explains the key concepts of Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
- Chapter 12, Testing the Resiliency of Your Infrastructure and Architecture With AWS Fault Injection Service, introduces you to chaos engineering and FIS – a service that lets you inject failures into your AWS-deployed applications to test their ability to withstand such failures when they happen in production.
- Chapter 13, Deploying Infrastructure Using CI/CD Pipelines covers the topic of automated infrastructure rollout based on IaC code that is stored in the version control system git.
- Chapter 14, Building Reusable Infrastructure-as-Code Components covers patterns and best practices when building reusable components for your teams to scale infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) usage.
- Chapter 15, Ensuring Compliance using AWS Config and SCPs introduces two different methods, a proactive and reactive way, to block or detect the creation of infrastructure that is non-compliant with your set of rules and requirements.
- Chapter 16, Operating in a Multi-Account Environment introduces AWS Organizations as a way to setup the multiple AWS accounts usually required when operating a real-world application in the cloud.
- Chapter 17, End-to-End Deployment of an Application uses the tools, techniques, and concepts learned throughout the book to cover the end-to-end deployment of an application.
Writing this book has been an intensive but exciting opportunity and I might follow with another post detailing my experiences. For now – I have written enough ;) You can pick up the book on amazon.
Category: Blog