Ask HN: Resources to Learn AWS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Resources to Learn AWS?

14 pointscaw10 comments

Hi HN

I work in IT, and I'm trying to expand my knowledge by learning AWS and get my head around the alphabet soup of AWS offerings.

I bought "Programming Amazon EC2" from O'Reilly, and while it covers the terminology, I find there's a lack of feedback for doing the exercises right, because it says to just follow along with your own app while they work with theirs. However, I don't have an app that would use every feature of AWS that you could use in production.

What did you use to learn AWS? Are there any tutorials or books that have code to deploy in an incremental fashion? I'm imagining "Here's EC2, your website now works! Let's add RDS. Now let's use S3 buckets for the static stuff. Now use CloudFront. Now let's ..." Would the latter be useful for anyone else if someone made it?

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AWS has extensive documentation on their own site. Also, stackoverflow.com has lots of questions & answers.

Finally, I highly recommend reading Eric Hammond's blog posts over the years, he is one of the most knowledgeable EC2/AWS users around - https://twitter.com/esh

Amazon's AWS docs:

http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/

And +1 for Eric Hammond's AWS blog, which you can find here:

http://alestic.com/

Also, if you want to go through a few self-paced labs, instead of docs, Amazon is partnered with an outfit, Cloud vLab, that has a platform for self-paced labs called qwikLAB. They have 3 AWS-related labs, each one requiring the purchase of a token for $29.99.

https://aws.amazon.com/training/self-paced-labs/

Some details:

https://qwiklab.zendesk.com/entries/25029147-Jeff-Barr-7-29-...

A review (in brief, the guy enjoyed doing the labs and learned from them, but felt, for the price, they could've gone more in-depth):

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/review/product-reviews/re...

The AWS Activate initiative for startups appears to give self-starters (boostrappers, I think) a free lab credit, amongst other things: https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

"Programming Amazon EC2" mentioned using the "Alestic" Ubuntu image rather the one from Canonical directly, but it didn't elaborate on who/what alestic was. I appreciate the information and will definitely look over the site. I already see on the front page that there's a new command line rather than the one the book was using.

I attended an AWS conference in SF this year and saved all of the tutorials to my dropbox. I think this is what you're looking for: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gyv5e3q6av9iqc8/lZ3_usn1s7

I'm not sure there is a huge amount to learn. You can do a lot through the AWS console. The S3 portion of the AWS console is just like any web storage service I have used. The EC2 portion allows you to start up instances with just point and click.

Much more difficult to pick up is the Linux administration side of things for EC2. If you already know Linux admin, then you are golden. If not, then that's where you would need to spend your time learning.

Since EC2 (and the rest of the suite) is all about using the API to automate things, you might want to add something like Ansible to your list of things to learn. Ansible has modules for starting EC2 instances, moving things back and forth from S3 and for other AWS services as well. This is probably how you would be using AWS in the real world.

[selfless plug] I wrote an introduction to AWS as an e-book here https://gumroad.com/l/HGlv

But it mainly serves as an architectural overview though.

I attended a lot of these webinars to pick up the basics.

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/events/

Then downloaded the manuals to my kindle for further reading.

Once you've got the basics, take advantage of the free tier and build up a dev environment

Amazon offers a free tier. sign up for an account and build something cool. You'll learn a lot along the way.

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