Introduction

Welcome to the Cloud Walkabout. This book will not be a technical manual of how your should do thing one or what is the best way to accomplish thing two.

It is story, some of it is fiction, some of it really happened.

Who is this book for?

I cannot say that this book is catered for a specific part of the technical community, because inside you will find something for people of all levels, from beginner to expert all the way to those who are upper management and finance. It is safe to say that if you are looking to this book to find detailed technical examples of how to deploy your applications in AWS - then you should probably stop right here - because this is not what this book is about.

That being said - there will be technical explanations, with detailed diagrams and examples that you can use - so if you are a geek like me then you will find a lot of useful information in the book.

How is this book divided?

These are the three stages of my journey.

1. Crawl
2. Walk
3. Fly

Crawl

One bright morning I was called into my managers office - and as I stepped in wondering what I have now screwed up - or if my boss is going to give me that talk about, “Sorry we have to downsize, there is not enough work…” and as my mind starts to take a long hard look at my past, and how to plan my future, the following happens. “Our current cloud solution is no longer viable, and upper management want us to move off of what we are using - and migrate everything to AWS. And it has to be done in the next three months.”

First thing I did was breathe a sigh of relief. Phew. I was not being fired. The next thing I did was say to myself, “Crap, how the hell are we going to do this - I have no expertise in AWS”

Now I had the task of understanding what this AWS thing really is. Of course I know a bit about AWS - being the market leader and innovator in the public cloud, but I did not really know exactly how it worked. So the first part was research. And a lot of it.

This is the crawl phase.

Understanding what EC2 is. How does a VPC work? Network segmentation. Building AMI’s. Which flavors should I be using? Deploying a few instances to test the waters, all of these and more are the start of your journey.

Walk

You now have the basic understanding of what you would like your VPC and deployments to look like. You have started to deploy some of your instances in AWS. Now it is time to start looking at some of the more advanced topics and ‘Enterprisy’ things.

Central Management. How do you synchronize code to AWS? Understanding cost - and where should you start your optimizations to start saving money (who wouldn’t love to get their CFO off their back?). Expanding beyond a single region. Load Balancing - and what do you do when AWS’ ELB does not serve your purpose? All of this and more.

Here is where you walk the walk.

Fly

The term that most of you are probably accustomed to is Crawl, Walk. Run.

Why did I choose fly? The answer to that is simple. One you are at the stage where you have your infrastructure deployed on AWS, running (hopefully like a well oiled machine), this is the stage where you start to look for ways to improve your deployments, improve the way you operate, and streamline your day-to-day operations.

With the possibilities that AWS provides, the services that you have available at your fingertips - will allow you to soar to new heights, develop software that you never thought was possible, in ways you never imagined.

This is where you learn to fly.