Introduction

This book is designed with one purpose in mind: to make it easy for you, the reader, to understand and begin using Amazon Web Services (AWS) — an emerging technology platform that is profoundly disrupting the technology industry and enabling hundreds of thousands of individuals, businesses, and nonprofit organizations to gain easy access to on-demand computing resources.

About This Book

In a sense, this book is an extension of my earlier book Virtualization For Dummies (Wiley Publishing), which has a chapter describing “The Future of Virtualization.” In my research to identify which direction virtualization would take, I came across Amazon Web Services, a then-new offering was referred to by Amazon employees as Infrastructure as a Service. To indicate how briefly this new type of computing has been available, the term cloud computing was still more than a year away when Virtualization For Dummies was published.

As I spoke to Amazon representatives about the company’s new offering, I experienced the same reaction I had when first exposed to open source software — a visceral response that made me ask out loud: “If this service is available to users, who will stick with the old way of doing things?”

Nothing in the subsequent years has changed my mind — in fact, that experience strengthens my conviction that cloud computing in general, and Amazon Web Services in particular, will transform the way applications are designed and built. I’ve worked with people from many ...

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