Cloud Essentials for Web Developers: A Hands-On Guide to AWS, Containers, CI/CD, and Cloud Architecture

"Do you have AWS experience?" — If this interview question makes you nervous, this book is for you.

This book is not an AWS Solutions Architect certification guide. It's for web developers who need to understand cloud just enough to deploy, debug, and have intelligent conversations with infrastructure engineers.

What You'll Learn

• Cloud Fundamentals — On-premise vs cloud, IaaS/PaaS/SaaS, shared responsibility model
• Provider Comparison — AWS, Azure, GCP service mapping and choosing the right one
• Compute — EC2 instances, instance types, pricing options (On-Demand, Spot, Reserved)
• Storage — S3, EBS, lifecycle policies, static website hosting with CloudFront
• Database — RDS, Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, managed vs self-managed
• Networking — VPC, subnets, Security Groups, NACL, VPC Peering
• DNS & Load Balancing — Route 53, ALB, NLB, path-based routing
• Containers & CI/CD — Docker on AWS, ECS/EKS, CodePipeline, Blue/Green deployment
• Monitoring & Logs — CloudWatch metrics, alarms, log retention, dashboards
• Cost Management — Right-sizing, Reserved Instances, tag-based cost tracking
• Migration & Architecture — 6R strategies, three-tier, microservices, serverless patterns

The "Just Enough" Philosophy

Every topic includes practical examples, cost estimates, and 43 diagrams. No prior cloud experience required. You won't design Transit Gateway networks or write IAM policies from scratch. You will understand what cloud services do, when to use them, and how much they cost.

16 chapters + 3 appendices including AWS service mapping, CLI cheat sheet, and cost calculation guide.

Part of the "Essential Knowledge for Web Developers" series (Book 2).