Distributed systems are unpredictable, and it can be an enormous (and expensive!) challenge to manage around potentially-crippling obstacles like hardware failures, unanticipated changes in load, network issues, or the need to rapidly scale or reconfigure your infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is a platform for hosting distributed applications in a secure, flexible cloud environment. AWS provides a suite of services designed to help you focus on what your application does instead of the infrastructure required to run it. Whether you're serving up blog pages, analyzing fast data in real-time, building software as a service, or implementing a massive e-commerce site, AWS provides both a stable platform and services that will scale with your application.

Amazon Web Services in Action introduces you to computing, storing and networking in the AWS cloud. You'll start with a broad overview of AWS and learn how to spin up servers manually and from the command line. Then, you'll explore infrastructure automation with the AWS CloudFormation service, where you can describe a blueprint of your infrastructure as code. As you progress through the book, you will learn how to isolate your systems using private networks to increase security and how to use the most valuable AWS managed services available on AWS. You'll also discover the benefits of stateless servers. In the end, you'll look at the AWS model for high availability, scaling, decoupling with queues and load balancers, and fault tolerance.

Andreas and Michael Wittig run a consultancy focused on AWS and web development. Together, they migrated the complete IT infrastructure of the first Bank in Germany to AWS. They have expertise in distributed system development and architecture, with experience in algorithmic trading and real-time analytics. They are proponents of the DevOps model.