Great book for getting started developing on amazon ec2. It's a fast-read, giving a nice overview of all the different products amazon has to offer and how or when to use them. It also provides examples with code snippets on how automate some more complex tasks like scaling and making snapshots. Although this book is a very quick start for new Amazon ec2 users, I'm afraid it might get outdated quite fast since amazon continuously adds more features and new products to the mix and makes things easier.

Because this is a short book, I'll write a short review. Programming Amazon EC2 (PAE) explains how to use certain elements of Amazon Web Services to deploy applications in Amazon's cloud infrastructure. The discussion centers on the authors' experiences deploying live, production Web sites (like Kulitzer) using AWS. I found this approach refreshing and novel, because it reads like a playbook for recreating similar infrastructure for the reader's own purposes.

PAE regularly explains how to accomplish tasks using the AWS Web interface, but crucially (for me anyways) the book also generally shows the same processes using command line tools on Linux. Because I find it easier to read CLI instructions than follow screenshots of Web sites, I appreciated the text-based approach. PAE also helps the reader understand the reasoning behind Amazon's release of various AWS offerings. It's clearer now the problems Amazon was solving internally, which drove the delivery of new capabilities to customers.

My main problem with PAE is the almost total lack of security considerations. I say "almost" because the word "secure" does appear on p 87: "One advantage of SimpleDB here is that it's ready to use right away. There is no setup or administration hassle, the data is secure..." Sure it is! The authors also mention using Access Control Lists to permit Internet users to use Web applications, but otherwise there is no discussion of the risks of relying on cloud infrastructure. Reading recent news should be enough to remind the reader of these issues.

Overall, you will like PAE if you're looking to see how another small company jumpstarted their business by deploying applications in AWS. For future editions I would like to see discussions of security plus comparisons to other cloud offerings.

Programming Amazon EC2Programming Amazon EC2 is a hands-on guide to use of Amazon's cloud platform, with a focus on showing the reader how to approach the various components of the EC2 ecosystem. The authors state early on that the goal is to give the reader "a sense of all AWS functionality", so you will not find any one area explored in extreme detail.

The text generally achieves its goals. After a brief history of EC2 at Amazon, it moves quickly into establishing the necessary tools environment and then connecting to a new machine instance. This is not a cookbook, and some mundane yet critical details (e.g., setting permissions on your key files to 400 when running on Linux) are skipped; these are not fatal omissions, but they may hamper your experience if you are not seasoned on your platform of choice. Also, most examples are geared toward the Linux (Ubuntu) environment, so you will need to be able to translate those commands and concepts to your chosen environment. Once the machine image has booted, this text will assume that you are fully competent to administer the operating system of that image, including package installation, editing configuration files, etc.

Overall, good breadth of information in a relatively quick read, although you will need to follow along and try the examples with your chosen image/environment/application to really see a return on time invested.

Disclaimer, I was provided access by O'Reilly Publishing to an electronic copy of this book for review purposes.