The Good Parts of AWS

by Daniel Vassallo, Josh Pschorr

This is not your typical reference book. It doesn't cover all of AWS or all its quirks. Instead, we want to help you realize which AWS features you’d be foolish not to use. Features for which you almost never need to consider alternatives. Features that have passed the test of time by being at the backbone of most things on the internet.

Making technical choices can be overwhelming. As developers, we have to make many choices from what seems like unlimited options. We have to choose a programming language, an application framework, a database, a cloud vendor, software dependencies, and many other things. AWS alone offers about 150 services, all with their own set of options and features, sometimes even overlapping with each other. In this book, we will reveal a technique we use ourselves to help make reliable technical choices without getting paralyzed in the face of so many options. This technique will be presented in the context of AWS, but it can be generalized to any other technical decision.

This is a book by Daniel Vassallo and Josh Pschorr. Between us, we have worked with AWS for 15 years, including 11 years working inside AWS. We have worked on all sorts of web applications, from small projects to massive web services running on thousands of servers. We have been using AWS since it was just three services without a web console, and we even got to help build a small part of AWS itself.

This is an opinionated book. We only cover topics we have significant first-hand experience with. You won't find most of the knowledge we share here in the AWS docs.

Genres: Technology, Computer Science, Programming

176 pages, ebook

Published December 24, 2019

Reviews

[Pulkit Goyal · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will just lay down a brutal truth here, this would have been much better as a series of blog posts rather than a book. I know, it's hard to monetize a blog series, but this makes very little sense as a book. It is organized very roughly, "The Good Parts of AWS" were over within the first chapter and the remaining portion is just some Infrastructure as code using AWS.

[Ramesh Mhetre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Going by title, I was expecting it to be more use case based but it was with a lot of detailed code examples. The initial information of different services was still really useful.

[Sina Homayooni · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd say this is a terrible choice for those who are new to AWS. The first section of the book which is disappointingly brief, covers some of the most popular services. Shockingly (as you'll find it contrary to the name), the rest is about Cloud Formation service and filled with code snippets.
This book is only useful for those who want to see CloudFormation in action and how other services can be utilized through it.

[Dimos Raptis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was a bit underwhelmed by the book, especially given the praises it has received on various social media. The first part of the book contains a quick description of the main services of AWS ("the good parts") along with a few bits of wisdom from the authors' experiences using them (and potentially building some of them). I can't say I didn't like this part, but I had much higher expectations. Each service has a couple of pages dedicated to it, so each section essentially contains a high-level description of the service along with some commentary on limitations, trade-offs when compared with other services etc. Some things the authors describe probably do not exist in the public documentation and can be useful information for making a decision on which service to pick, but the rest felt like a very, very, very summarised version of the docs. For example, when talking about DynamoDB, the chapter describes it as a partitioned B-tree data structure and that's really it. No discussion about partition keys / sort keys / hot partitions etc... The second part is the practical and it's essentially a walk through of how to setup an application on AWS, starting from the basic parts (e.g. spinning up EC2 servers etc.) to a bit more advanced parts (network isolation / continuous integration etc.). This is probably something that would be useful to someone that hasn't built an application on the cloud before, but personally (having used some parts of AWS before) I just skimmed quickly through it and I realised there wasn't much to gain really. I managed to read the book in one sitting and it took me an hour or so.

In summary, the book feels like something that could be useful for someone who's making their first steps on the cloud and want to get a very quick & high-level overview of the available options on AWS and their pros & cons, but probably not extremely useful to people with at least some experience.

[Hercules Merscher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book has some good parts but, as of now, it deserves some updates.

The overview of AWS services says nothing more than what is already written in AWS selling pitches but the bootstrap does present a nice way of using them via automation through CloudFormation, though CloudFormation is not reliable most times and the visibility is not that good either. The container solutions are missing as well, and nowadays I believe such technologies should be taken into consideration as part of this book as well. The book is from 2019, so it's not like it is a super old book that didn't know about the existence of containers at all.

Could be better but it's not an expensive book, so I would recommend to have a glimpse of how we can automate AWS service provision.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think what I hated the most is the CloudFormation syntax I was not familiar with before reading this book. A good introduction to 'essential' topics on AWS. I would definitely not say these are "the good parts" of AWS, and I'm quite concerned why an ex-engineer of AWS would say such thing (maybe for people to buy his book). A good reference if you have bought it but I actually do not recommend it for beginners on AWS. Try some other paid tutorial (surely a more clear alternative than this book) or free resources that are all over the Internet.

[Sumit Gouthaman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really worth it. The 2 sections seem like they are written for completely different audiences.

Part 1 is too basic and too concise to be of much value.

Part 2 is slightly valuable, but too cloud formation heavy.

Overall, it feels like someone attempted to monetize a couple of blog posts by quickly turning them into a book. You’ll find tons of better resources elsewhere for free.

[Jaakko · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s good stuff here, like only covering a few services and pointing out which features you don’t want to use. But most of the book is Cloudformation configurations, which was not that interesting to me. I would have preferred to get that information in some other way.

[Tomek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm disappointed. First part is way too short. Based on the content there, looks like there are no good parts of AWS at all... The second part is mainly about CloudFormation (lot's of code snippets!) and... it ends abruptly without any conclusions, summary, or next steps for curious readers.

[Ane · Rating 1 out of 5]

The content isn't bad, the first part is insightful. But the second part is just a tutorial on how to do various tasks. There is no structure whatsoever, no table of contents, no chapters, no conclusion. The book just ends after the last tutorial. Writing a book requires some more work than this.

[Ivan Parfenchuk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can be used as an overview reference material on how to configure deployment to AWS.

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introduction, but a bit high level, a bit short. Also, the code snippets make it somewhat hard to read.

[Saif · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a good tour of a few basic AWS services for complete beginners.
I was under the impression it was for more advanced engineers, but that’s my mistake.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, high level, but useful intro to the most useful building blocks, as well as some of the quirks of each service to consider when designing systems.

[Maria Ines · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a good intro to AWS, but the recommendation to use CloudFormation is... bad. (Source: I used to work in CloudFormation).

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit too simple, also not sure how popular CloudFormation is vs Terraform. I was hoping for more content on the security side.