Engineering Resilient Systems on AWS

Chapter 2. Prepare Your Working Environment

In Chapter 1, you were introduced to resilience in the AWS cloud, highlighting the frameworks and the resilience mental model for anticipating, observing, and mitigating failure modes in complex systems. In this chapter, you’ll prepare yourself and your software development working environment for a series of hands-on resilience lessons. The hands-on lessons in this book walk you through building resilient components of the fictitious electronic trading application, AvailableTrade. This chapter focuses on installing and configuring the tools you need to run the lessons. If you intend to work through the hands-on examples, which we feel is the best way to learn, start by installing each of the tools listed. If you don’t already have them installed or don’t understand how to install them when you need them, links are provided to public documentation for each tool.

The resilience patterns demonstrated throughout the lessons in this book span industries and use cases beyond the AvailableTrade application and the financial services industry. However, using a financial services model helps us mentally align the importance of the use cases and lessons demonstrated in this book to real-world scenarios we are familiar with. Critical systems that require your intentional focus on resilience include systems like customer-facing applications that provide the brand and face of a company, payment systems that move money in real time, and systems that ...