This is not your typical reference book. It doesn't cover all of AWS or all its quirks. Instead, we want to help you realize which AWS features you’d be foolish not to use. Features for which you almost never need to consider alternatives. Features that have passed the test of time by being at the backbone of most things on the internet.

Making technical choices can be overwhelming. As developers, we have to make many choices from what seems like unlimited options. We have to choose a programming language, an application framework, a database, a cloud vendor, software dependencies, and many other things. AWS alone offers about 150 services, all with their own set of options and features, sometimes even overlapping with each other. In this book, we will reveal a technique we use ourselves to help make reliable technical choices without getting paralyzed in the face of so many options. This technique will be presented in the context of AWS, but it can be generalized to any other technical decision.

This is a book by Daniel Vassallo and Josh Pschorr. Between us, we have worked with AWS for 15 years, including 11 years working inside AWS. We have worked on all sorts of web applications, from small projects to massive web services running on thousands of servers. We have been using AWS since it was just three services without a web console, and we even got to help build a small part of AWS itself.

This is an opinionated book. We only cover topics we have significant first-hand experience with. You won't find most of the knowledge we share here in the AWS docs.