AWS System Administration: Best Practices for Sysadmins in the Amazon Cloud

Building and deploying infrastructure with Amazon Web Services is simply not the same as dealing with static servers. With tools that let you automatically replace instances and scale up and down in response to demand, it’s actually more like programming than traditional system administration—and ideal for a DevOps environment.

This comprehensive guide shows developers and system administrators alike how to configure and manage AWS services, such as CloudFormation, OpsWorks, Elastic Load Balancing, and Route 53. System administrators will learn how to integrate their favorite tools and processes, while developers will pick up enough system administration knowledge to build a robust and resilient AWS application infrastructure.

• Launch instances with EC2 or CloudFormation
• Apply AWS security tools at the beginning of your project
• Learn configuration management with OpsWorks and Puppet
• Deploy applications with Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing
• Explore methods to deploy application and infrastructure updates
• Reuse resources to save time on development and operations
• Learn strategies for managing log files in AWS
• Configure a cloud-aware DNS service with Route 53
• Use CloudWatch or traditional tools to monitor your application

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Setting Up AWS Tools
Chapter 2. First Steps with EC2 and CloudFormation
Chapter 3. Access Management and Security Groups
Chapter 4. Configuration Management
Chapter . An Example Application Stack
Chapter 6. Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing
Chapter 7. Deployment Strategies
Chapter 8. Building Reusable Components
Chapter 9. Log Management
Chapter 10. DNS with Route 53
Chapter 11. Monitoring
Chapter 12. Backups