Why did I want to write this book?

At the beginning of 2017 - I dived into a project that required us to migrate a large number of instances from an OpenStack cloud to AWS (Amazon Web Services). This required me to get acquainted with the AWS services that we were already using and adapt rapidly to a whole new world.

I have been writing on my blog for over eight years and I have already co-authored two other technical books, but I feel that when solely focusing on the technical aspect of a certain subject, you miss out on the human aspect of the story. The Why, the How and What the heck happened.

Over the years while attending countless conferences - I learned that the presenters who actually tell a story - those are the presentations that you remember. They are personal - the presenters expose themselves and share - and they share from their heart. That is why these presentations are so good, and they stick.

The first technical novel I read was The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford (ISBN: 0988262592) and for the first time - I enjoyed reading a story about IT and what problems they were facing. I could relate to the situations throughout the book, I had been in that position, many times. If you have not yet read the book - I highly recommend you do so.

When starting out my AWS journey I was looking for how do I accomplish this - or what is the best way to get that to work - and what I found out there was a whole lot of AWS documentation (which is welcome) and number of blog posts, and of course the usual number of technical books.

I felt that the technical terms, books and white papers out there and information is great - but I was missing the background behind it all. Why did this happen? What was the problem they were trying to solve? As I said before, a good part of the delivery is the story behind it.

And then this book was born.