AWS News Blog

Now Available: Host Your Web Site in the Cloud

I am very happy to announce that my first book, Host Your Web Site in the Cloud is now available! Weighing in at over 355 pages, this book is designed to show developers how to build sophisticated AWS applications using PHP and the CloudFusion toolkit.

Here is the table of contents:

  1. Welcome to Cloud Computing.
  2. Amazon Web Services Overview.
  3. Tooling Up.
  4. Storing Data with Amazon S3.
  5. Web Hosting with Amazon EC2.
  6. Building a Scalable Architecture with Amazon SQS.
  7. EC2 Monitoring, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing.
  8. Amazon SimpleDB: A Cloud Database.
  9. Amazon Relational Database Service.
  10. Advanced AWS.
  11. Putting It All Together: CloudList.

After an introduction to the concept of cloud computing and a review of each of the Amazon Web Services in the first two chapters, you will set up your development environment in chapter three. Each of the next six chapters focuses on a single service. In addition to a more detailed look at each service, each of these chapters include lots of full-functional code. The final chapter shows you how to use AWS to implement a simple classified advertising system.

Although I am really happy with all of the chapters, I have to say that Chapter 6 is my favorite. In that chapter I show you how to use the Amazon Simple Queue Service to build a scalable multistage image crawling, processing, and rendering pipeline. I build the code step by step, creating a queue, writing the code for a single step, running it, and then turning my attention to the next step. Once I had it all up and running, I opened up five PuTTY windows, ran a stage in each, and watched the work flow through the pipeline with great rapidity. Here’s what the finished pipeline looks like:

I had a really good time writing this book and I hope that you will have an equally good time as you read it and put what you learn to good use in your own AWS applications.

Today (September 21) at 4 PM PT I will be participating in a webinar with the good folks from SitePoint. Sign up now if you would like to attend.

— Jeff;

PS – If you are interested in the writing process and how I stayed focused, disciplined, and organized while I wrote the book, check out this post on my personal blog.