Overview

Who is this book for?

This book is for people who know the basics of AWS and Amazon S3 but want to make sure they are using it in the best possible way, a way that adheres to the six pillars of the well-architected framework of best practices. The book is split into the pillars of the well architected framework so you can jump to Security if you want to check out those reciepes. There are a few tips and tricks in here even for the more experienced practitioners. I’ll guide you through the best practices for security and show you how to save money on common tasks. We’ll look at static web hosting, offloading static assets from your CMS and much much more as we go. One of my favourite integrations with S3 is the ability to automate actions after a file has been uploaded with Lambda.

What can you get from this book?

This book will guide you round some of the best practices around using Amazon S3 and hopefully help you discover it’s much much more than just a simple storage service, I’m a self-confessed S3 fanboy and hopefully this book will share my enthusiasm with you. You’ll learn how to secure your workloads and host a website that can take an impressive amount of load!

Why Well-Architected?

The Well-Architected Framework provides best practices in a business and technical way with regards to your cloud deployment. Keeping the balance of delivering the best and most relevant technology with observability will help you run a smooth experience for your customers.

It’s a set of design principles that can be broadly applied to most clouds and on-premises deployments. However, we tend to think of it as an AWS thing but it’s so much more. We first saw the framework as a set of white-papers in 2015 and like you are now I was skeptical, I think we’ve all read some pretty dull white-papers in our time. The Well-Architected Framework, however, was a refreshing read and I must admit I was an instant fanboy. I was lucky enough to work as a customer and alongside one of its creators throughout my career and have truly valued its impact on the industry and allowed me to do the right thing for my customers in a validated way. Applying these pillars to projects ensures a successful release of a workload every time. Since its launch there have been modifications and updates, there is now a Well-Architected tool in the console where you answer questions to qualify your workload against the pillars and identify areas that may need improvement, but once you get going you’ll find it handy to validate your work and have the tools and docs to prove it. There are also lenses for Machine Learning, Data Analytics, Serverless and many more. If you want to check it out in more detail head here: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/. The next few chapters collect together recipes that broadly fit into one of the six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework, these are:

• Opperational Excellence
• Security
• Reliability
• Performanace Efficiency
• Cost Optimization
• Sustainability

I’ve marked each recipe with a primary pillar (explained in the concepts section). However the pillars often cross over so i’ve highlighted when doing a certain action may affect another pillar also. Check out the concepts used in the is book to get a better idea of that.