target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#i000000550000.jpg" alt="image"/> Gareth Digby, Technical Trainer for AWS, delivers training on AWS services to students throughout North America. Gareth holds a B.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Swansea. Gareth has held full time faculty posts in the Electrical and Electric Engineering Department at the University of Swansea and at the School of Electrical and Electric Engineering at the University of Birmingham. He has taught as adjunct faculty in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and the Graduate School at Penn State. Prior to joining AWS, in addition to his academic posts, Gareth held System Engineering and System Architecture roles on a variety of public sector projects. Gareth wants to thank Enfield Grammar School for introducing him to computers, the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, and the Computer Science Department at the University of Wales, Swansea for inspiring him to teach about computers. He would also like to thank his family for allowing him to pursue these passions for far too many years.
Christopher Fitch is a Technical Trainer with AWS. He has over 15 years’ experience in various engineering, administration, and architectural positions. His experience brings with it a combination of academic and hands-on knowledge that’s provided a diverse and well-rounded set of skills. Prior to working with AWS, he spent most of his career working with the DoD. Christopher holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Technical Management from DeVry University, a Master of Science in Information Systems, and a Master of Science in Network and Communications Management from the Keller Graduate School. Chris is a geek at heart. He is a native Floridian and Seattle transplant who is passionate about design, photography, and biking.
Steve Friedberg has been an educator for 40 years, teaching in ten different countries. He has been a course developer and instructor for IBM, Oracle, DEC, Cisco, Microsoft, Marconi, and TIBCO, as well as an adjunct professor at Grace College in Winona Lake, IN. He has been with AWS as a Technical Trainer for over a year, and he holds all three AWS Associate certifications. Steve’s formal training includes a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Cornell University and a Master of Arts in Education from Ball State University. He lives with his wife in Indiana near his children and grandchildren. His real passion is teaching and developing curriculum about the Old Testament feasts, holidays, and prophecies.
Shaun Qualheim has been with AWS since September 2014. He is currently serving customers as a Senior Solutions Architect. In previous lives, Shaun was a Linux Systems Administrator at companies ranging from a leading computational fluid dynamics (CFD) company to one of the largest educational assessment companies in the world. Shaun is the proud father of an amazing 9-year old son, Jackson, who loves to come to the NYC AWS office and socialize with everyone. He wishes to thank his team for their patience while he worked on this book. Shaun would like to dedicate his portion of this book to his father, who taught him the value of never wavering in doing what’s right for the customer and whose example continues to show him the value of diligent work. Without that guidance, Shaun wouldn’t be where he is today.
Jerry Rhoads has been with AWS since May 2014. Jerry started off as a Solutions Architect, and he recently joined the Training and Certification Team as a Technical Trainer. Jerry holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science and a Master of Science in Information Systems Technology from the George Washington University, as well as all five AWS certifications. Jerry would like to give special thanks to Dr. Marjorie Battaglia, who inspired him to be a better writer; Reggie Carreker, who provided him with a passion for teaching; his wife, Linda, and his four children (+ one on the way), Ashley, Harry, Tinsley, and Liam for their much-needed patience and inspiration.
Michael Roth is a Technical Trainer with AWS, having joined Amazon in 2015. He is a Certified Cisco Network Academy Instructor and has taught Linux. Michael graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Planning. He also has a Master of Science Degree in Telecommunications Management from Golden Gate University. Michael would like to thank his co-workers in the AWS Technical Training Organization – he is very proud to be a part of this amazing group of people. Finally, he would like to thank his spouse, Betsy, and son, Robert. Without their support and love, this book would not have been possible.
Blaine Sundrud began his teaching career at the Show Low Arizona High School before becoming a product evangelist for Digital Technology International. At DTI, Blaine worked with newspapers from around the world helping them improve their publishing platforms, until he realized that supporting the print newspaper industry was not a long-term employment option. Blaine now works in the Training and Certification department at AWS, where he holds all five certifications. His current focus is on leveraging brain science to improve classroom learning through the NeuroEducate program that he developed at AWS. Blaine wants to thank his three children: Kelly, Hunter, and Dessa for their resiliency, as well as his wife, Diana, for her high availability.
Foreword
I entered college in 1978, and I immediately found a second home at the computer lab on campus. This lab was home to an IBM mainframe and a roomful of noisy keypunch machines. I punched my code onto a stack of cards, and I handed the stack to a system operator. The operator loaded the cards into the reader, and my job was queued for processing. If things went well and the mainframe was not too busy, I would have my cards and my output back within four hours or so. The operator managed the work queue for the mainframe, adjusting the balance of jobs and priorities, looking for hot spots and slowdowns, and keeping the monolithic mainframe as busy and as productive as possible at all times.
As a young, curious student, I always wondered what was happening behind the scenes. As a young, impoverished student, in the days before the Internet, information was not always easy to come by. I found a rack of manuals in the lab, figured out how to order others for free, and even scavenged the trash cans for operating system “builds” to study. That thirst for knowledge, with a focus on understanding how things work at the most fundamental level, has worked really well for me over the intervening four decades.
A little over a decade ago, I wrote blog posts to announce the launches of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Those early launches set the tone for what was to come, introducing services that emerged with a minimal feature set that would be enhanced over time in response to customer feedback. At that time, aspiring AWS developers and architects did not need to make very many choices when they set out to build an AWS-powered system. There was one instance type, a couple of Availability Zones in a single Region, and simple access via the AWS CLI and the API.
Back in my mainframe days, operations was a hands-on affair. There was little in the way of tooling or automation; the operator was expected to watch the console, check on status, and to deal with issues as they arose. Today, many routine operations are handled automatically. Fault tolerance, automatic scaling, load balancing, and other high-level facilities take on many chores that were once described in detailed run books. With this change, systems operations comes into play much earlier in the system-building process, with the goal of setting up the system for success and high availability. At the same time, the operations role now spans a wider range of tasks and technologies including networking, security, and optimization. With pay-as-you-go services now the norm, people who once focused on technology can now add business skills to their repertoire.
If you are about to read this book, I am sure that you know that AWS is far more complex than it was a decade ago. On the Amazon EC2 side alone, there are now dozens of instance types, multiple types of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) volumes, and far more moving parts. There are now close to 100 services,
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