Resilience and Reliability on AWS

Chapter 3. Crash Course in AWS

Amazon AWS at the time of writing offers 33 services. We will not talk about all of them, mostly because they are not relevant to the theme of this book.

In this chapter we will highlight the core AWS services we use to build the components we talked about in the previous chapter. For those of you who have read Programming Amazon EC2, you can see this as a refresher. There we used nearly two hundred pages to describe these services and how to use them. Here we will condense it to one-tenth of that, including some new AWS services released recently.

If you are familiar with AWS services, you can skip this chapter, or just read those sections about the services you don’t know about. This chapter details all AWS services used in the remainder of the book (Figure 3-1). You can also use this chapter as a reference and come back to it later as necessary.

Figure 3-1. Overview of some of AWS services

For the rest of the book, prior knowledge and experience with AWS is not necessary, but a good understanding of the services in this and the next chapter is instrumental.

In addition to being shown in the AWS Management Console, AWS services are exposed programmatically via a set of well defined APIs, implemented as web services. These can be accessed via command line tools or any of the different libraries or toolkits in the different programming languages (Java, PHP, ...