Mastering Amazon EC2 by Badri Kesavan is an excellent resource for anyone looking to dive deep into Amazon EC2. Badri, who is highly active in the AWS user group communities as an organizer, speaker, and coordinator, shares his extensive knowledge in this book, making it a valuable guide for learners.
Steve Teo has already written a fantastic foreword, which sets the tone by explaining why this book is a must-read. The book starts by covering the fundamentals of EC2, making it easy for beginners to get started. It then gradually dives deeper, exploring every EC2 component, feature, and detail, including Elastic Block Store (EBS), snapshots, building and managing AMIs, and more.
I particularly enjoyed the chapters that discuss the various EC2 instance types and how to select the most suitable one for different workloads. The sections on networking, where the author explains Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and related networking components, are also very well done.
Security is another area where the book excels. It covers Role Based Access Control (RBAC), network security, data encryption, and operating system security thoroughly. After laying down the basics, Badri moves on to real-world scenarios, including application servers, load balancers, auto-scaling, and storage for EC2.
The advanced chapters delve into AWS placement groups, monitoring, logging, and maintenance using Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and backup strategies. The book also touches on AWS CloudFormation, which is very useful for automating infrastructure.
The chapter on containerization and serverless computing was particularly interesting and offered a glimpse into the future of cloud computing.
Overall, “Mastering Amazon EC2” is an excellent book to start learning EC2 and all the details surrounding it. I got this book about a month ago, but I was tied up with my Kubernetes book chapters and couldn’t finish it earlier. Last week, I finally had the time to complete it, and I’m glad I did.
Thanks to Packt and Rohan for providing a copy of this insightful book!