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

With platforms designed for rapid adaptation and failure recovery such as Amazon Web Services, cloud computing is more like programming than traditional system administration. Tools for automatic scaling and instance replacement allow even small DevOps teams to manage massively scalable application infrastructures―if team members drop their old views of development and operations and start mastering automation.

This comprehensive guide shows developers and system administrators how to configure and manage AWS services including EC2, CloudFormation, Elastic Load Balancing, S3, and Route 53. Sysadms will learn will learn to automate their favorite tools and processes; developers will pick up enough ops knowledge to build a robust and resilient AWS application infrastructure.

• Launch instances with EC2 or CloudFormation
• Securely deploy and manage your applications with AWS tools
• Learn to automate AWS configuration management with Python and Puppet
• Deploy applications with Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing
• Explore approaches for deploying application and infrastructure updates
• Save time on development and operations with reusable components
• Learn strategies for managing log files in AWS environments
• Configure a cloud-aware DNS service with Route 53
• Use AWS CloudWatch to monitor your infrastructure and applications

Mike has worked as a system administrator since the early 2000s in a variety of roles, including an ISP, at Greenpeace, and most recently a social media startup. In recent years, he have spent increasing amounts of time working with cloud services such as AWS, which has dovetailed perfectly with his love of automation and scalability.

As well as doing system administration as a day job, he is also building his own AWS-based startup. Cloudfrag provides on-demand game servers and relies heavily on a wide range of AWS services.

Federico Lucifredi was the lead Product Manager for Ubuntu Server, Amazon Web Services' most popular operating system. While at Canonical, Federico led the Certified Public Cloud program, ensuring the seamless integration of Ubuntu into AWS and other public clouds. He is currently the Ceph Product Management Director at Red Hat, and can be reached on Twitter as @0xF2.

Federico is a graduate of Boston College and Harvard University. He is a frequent speaker at user group and conference events.