Programming Amazon Web Services:

 

S3, EC2, SQS, FPS and Simple DB

Reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Author: James Murty O'Reilly http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515812/index.html Released: March 2008  Pages: 600 $50 USD ISBN: 9780596515812   Strengths: Remember mainframe services? Guess what…   Weaknesses: You have to pay to use these services from Amazon.

Introduction

 

Building on the success of its storefront and fulfillment services, Amazon now allows businesses to "rent" computing power, data storage and bandwidth on its vast network platform. This book demonstrates how developers working with small- to mid-sized companies can take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Flexible Payments Service (FPS), and SimpleDB to build web-scale business applications.

 

With AWS, Amazon offers a new paradigm for IT infrastructure: use what you need, as you need it, and pay as you go. Programming Amazon Web Services explains how you can access Amazon's open APIs to store and run applications, rather than spend precious time and resources building your own. With this book, you'll learn all the technical details you need to:

 

• Store and retrieve any amount of data using application servers, unlimited data storage, and bandwidth with the Amazon S3 service
• Buy computing time using Amazon EC2's interface to requisition machines, load them with an application environment, manage access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as needed
• Use Amazon's web-scale messaging infrastructure to store messages as they travel between computers with Amazon SQS
• Leverage the Amazon FPS service to structure payment instructions and allow the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers
• Create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results using Amazon SimpleDB.
• Scale up or down at a moment's notice, using these services to employ as much time and space as you need

Whether you're starting a new online business, need to ramp up existing services, or require an offsite backup for your home, Programming Amazon Web Services gives you the background and the practical knowledge you need to start using AWS. Other books explain how to build web services. This book teaches businesses how to take make use of existing services from an established technology leader.

What I Learned

 

Amazon figured out how to offer mainframe services in the guise of "Web Services" and also made it sweet enough that all the programmers are buzzing around it like it was nectar. Or sow Amazon would like us to believe. This book tells how Amazon has turned AWS into a lucrative business for itself and strives to be the end-all by offering its services form lessons learned to those who don't want to reinvent the web e-commerce wheel.

 

There are 13 chapters on infrastructure, interaction, Simple Storage Service, applications (sharing, backup, elastic drives and mediated access), Elastic Compute Cloud instances images and appications, Simple Queue Service, and applications, Flexible payments service, transactions and accounts, Gatekeeper language, and micropayments, building marketplace applications and subscribing to event notifications and Simple DB domains, items attributes and stock price. There are also two appendices on AWS resources and error codes.

 

Much of these were done in Ruby.

 

Conclusion

 

If you want to pay and pay and pay for web services through Amazon, you will learn how to do so. If you want to emulate their service structure, you will need to go elsewhere. They invented the E-commerce wheel and know how to drive this web-based vehicle. This book is the driver's training instruction manual.