AWS® For Admins For Dummies®
AWS® For Admins For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Media and software compilation copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Trademarks: Wiley, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and may not be used without written permission. AWS is a registered trademark of Amazon Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND THE AUTHOR MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS WORK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES OR PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS. THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY SITUATION. THIS WORK IS SOLD WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THE PUBLISHER IS NOT ENGAGED IN RENDERING LEGAL, ACCOUNTING, OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. IF PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANCE IS REQUIRED, THE SERVICES OF A COMPETENT PROFESSIONAL PERSON SHOULD BE SOUGHT. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR THE AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES ARISING HEREFROM. THE FACT THAT AN ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE IS REFERRED TO IN THIS WORK AS A CITATION AND/OR A POTENTIAL SOURCE OF FURTHER INFORMATION DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE AUTHOR OR THE PUBLISHER ENDORSES THE INFORMATION THE ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE MAY PROVIDE OR RECOMMENDATIONS IT MAY MAKE. FURTHER, READERS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT INTERNET WEBSITES LISTED IN THIS WORK MAY HAVE CHANGED OR DISAPPEARED BETWEEN WHEN THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN AND WHEN IT IS READ.
For general information on our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax 317-572-4002. For technical support, please visit https://hub.wiley.com/community/support/dummies.
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954413
ISBN 978-1-119-31248-2; ISBN 978-1-119-31250-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-31249-9 (ebk)
Introduction
Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out as a rather small undertaking that allowed a developer to create applications that queried all things Amazon. You could perform queries, obtain sales data, and even upload offerings for sale. However, the focus was on Amazon. That’s not the case today! Now you can manage an entire company using AWS. The offerings are varied, more than any one organization is likely to need, and the focus is no longer on Amazon, but on your company and your company’s needs.
Of course, you might wonder why Amazon deserves special attention given that there are many other cloud providers (such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM) available today. According to a recent ComputerWorld article (http://www.computerworld.com/article/3102904/cloud-computing/four-us-companies-rule-the-worlds-cloud-infrastructure.html), Amazon currently owns 31 percent of the cloud computing market, which means that your organization stands to benefit from Amazon’s huge installed base of customer-tested services. According to CIO magazine, AWS is so popular that companies like Gartner that track statistics for it have had to change their charting methods just to keep AWS on the charts when compared to the competition. AWS For Admins For Dummies helps you understand not only why you need these services to remain competitive but also how to use them to gain the maximum effectiveness and efficiency for your organization.
Following the progress of AWS over the years gives me a unique perspective of the services it offers today, which is why you need AWS For Admins For Dummies if your job is to administer your organization’s offerings and perform tasks like getting a cloud-based setup started. Just digging through the offerings and figuring out what you need is likely to prove daunting, which is why this book offers you clear-cut paths and helps you overcome the hype to do something useful in a short time.
The purpose of AWS For Admins For Dummies is to help you figure out what you need and create a basic functional setup that enables you to become productive sooner than later. This book separates the programming aspects of AWS from the administrative aspects, so you don’t have to read reams of developer-specific information to find the one item you really need as an administrator. Of course, this book isn’t just for administrators, but for anyone who needs to get a basic AWS setup configured for any need. DevOps and developers can use this book as well, even though it does focus on administrative tasks.
AWS For Admins For Dummies is designed to make things simple. That’s why it focuses on using the AWS consoles to perform tasks whenever possible and resorts to the command-line interface only when necessary. By following the procedures in this book, you can set up and configure a computing environment quickly and easily.
This book also helps you separate hype from reality. The Amazon documentation would often have you believe that everything works perfectly in AWS, which clearly can’t happen. Every piece of software, even cloud software, has quirks and issues that you need to know about. Most important, this book helps you understand when moving to the cloud might be a bad idea because of a number of issues that even the media is less than thrilled to tell you about. Rather than be lured by the hype, you’ll be best served by knowing when a cloud environment actually does meet your needs, rather than set you up for problems at some point or, worse yet, prove useless.
To help you absorb the concepts, this book uses the following conventions:
❯❯ Text that you’re meant to type just as it appears in the book is in bold. The exception is when you’re working through a step list: Because each step is bold, the text to type is not bold.
❯❯ Words for you to type in that are also in italics are meant as placeholders; you need to replace them with something that works for you. For example, if you see “Type Your Name and press Enter,” you need to replace Your Name with your actual name.
❯❯ I also use italics for terms I define. This means that you don’t have to rely on other sources to provide the definitions you need.
❯❯ Web addresses and programming code appear in monofont. If you’re reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the Internet, you can click the live link to visit a website, like this: http://www.dummies.com.
❯❯