REVIEW: Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches
And just like that, January is gone.
We are through a full month of 2019, which has already been a whirlwind of a year. If you have been following along on my posts, you know that I was impacted by the government shutdown and furloughed for quite some time. I won't retell the whole story (check out my previous post if interested), but during that forced time off, I decided to make the best of the situation and accomplish two things:
1) Be productive and use that time to learn and develop new skills.
2) Re-attempt a goal I had set for myself (and failed at) in 2018, which was to read at least one chapter per day, and at least one book per month.
This year I modified those rules slightly, and my aim is to complete one "reading" book per month, and additionally, I would also like to work through one technical book per month.
With those rules in mind, I am off to a great start for 2019! Yesterday I posted my review for the "reading" book I finished, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. Then, last night, I completed by technical book for the month, Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches.
Looking back at my previous posts, you can see that I am a fan of the Month of Lunches series. They are absolutely fantastic books. Even if it is in a subject area you are already familiar with, they are an easy to use source of reference, especially for uncommon tasks that you do not complete every day. I have used them for learning new skills, like in this case with AWS, but I enjoy these books so much that I have even bought the ones related to tasks that I have been doing for years, like Active Directory Management (will be doing a review for this one soon!). With the exception of one in the series so far (System Center Configuration Management, due to length of time to complete setup, processes, and the requirement of a full lab build), these books are excellent for daily lessons. The chapters contain a lot of information but are quick, easy reads, and then offer a lab assignment that should reinforce what you have learned.
Additionally, these books match up perfectly to the goal I have set for myself of working through one technical book per month, as these are designed and written, as stated in the title, to be completed in one month or less. I will be sad in a few months when I will be out of Month of Lunches books!
So, onto Learning Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches:
AWS is the hot item in IT right now. You see AWS being talked about and referenced everywhere - but most importantly, in job descriptions and postings. The growth of the DevOps movement, along with cost-effectiveness and ease of deployment in the cloud is driving a rapid shift into requirements of skills with AWS or similar services, like Microsoft's Azure. With the abundance of free time I had in January, I knew it was the perfect time to dive in and find out just what AWS was all about. To guide me into the AWS waters, I selected David Clinton and his Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches (AWSMoL) book as my coach.
To say I enjoyed this book is an understatement. It is fantastic. I have been through a number of the MoL books so far, and this one hands-down is the best of the bunch. David Clinton does a great job of clearly communicating a large amount of knowledge into 21 lessons. Each chapter is enjoyable to read and easy to follow along with, while also remaining short and to the point. Many of the MoL book lessons are do-able in a lunch hour, but some push that to the limits or can go slightly longer - especially for people like me who like to thoroughly read and take in the content, not speed through it. I did not find this to be an issue for any lesson within AWSMoL, as each was easily completed within the one hour window, yet I did not feel I was being cheated or shorted of any knowledge.
No single book will leave you an expert by any means, especially on a topic as large (and ever-expanding) as AWS. However, this book covers a large amount of ground in a short amount of time, giving you hands-on experience with the core functions/features of AWS - EC2, EBS, S3, RDS, Route 53, IAM, ELB, high availability, and more. There are then additional chapters that give information on a multitude of other components of AWS, like Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, etc., giving you an overview of what is available and possible with AWS. The book walks you through configuring a Linux LAMP web server and bringing it live. Then moving your site data to an S3 bucket, moving your database to an RDS instance, configuring security internally and externally, replicating data to additional instances in alternate subnets and/or regions and configuring a load balancer to increase performance and reliability, setting monitors to alert of systems down and to transfer services to alternate instances, configuring scalability so additional instances are automatically generated and brought into the environment to deal with unexpected/peak traffic, and then auto-scaling back down when traffic is normalized. The book primarily relies on the AWS console for many of these functions, but you are introduced to AWS CLI and it's configuration, and complete some tasks through this channel. That is only the first sections of the book!
Needless to say, this book does a fantastic job of introducing someone to AWS and showing them what it has to offer, in a very user-friendly way. If you are looking for an introduction to AWS and are unsure of where to start, this book is highly recommended.
I have fallen in love with AWS and am truly looking forward to learning more about it.
Until next time -