I've recently come across "The Good Parts of AWS" by Daniel Vassallo and Josh Pschorr.
It's an enjoyable read and quite handy for the right audience, but some readers may want more.
What is it?
"The Good Parts of AWS" is a short (less than 200 pages) read, in two chapters.
In the first chapter, the authors cover their ideas of sensible defaults and common AWS services (EC2, Lambda, S3, and others).
The second chapter covers deploying a basic application using successive more robust infrastructure as code environments.
The Good Parts
I enjoyed reading the opinionated section on various AWS services - it's a good guide to help with the "analysis paralysis" phase.
The infrastructure as code chapter was a reasonable introduction to the topic.
It was good to see use of Systems Manager as well, and the "Connect to Instance" feature was new to me.
The Missing Parts
As can be expected of such a short (and opinionated) title, many topics are skipped over or covered very quickly.
These include services like:
- Database services
- Direct Connect
- IAM
- ECS/EKS
- WAF
AWS has circa 250 services, so a book covering about 10 is naturally going to be light on detail.
Summary
"The Good Parts of AWS" is a good read if you want to get an idea of sensible defaults and potential pitfalls in fundamental AWS services - mainly EC2 and S3.
However, you'll find no such coverage for databases or containerised applications, and there is limited coverage of security related topics.
It provides a good starting point - if you are looking to get up to speed with AWS fundamentals and deploy a basic app in a single weekend.
However, if you are after a bit more than sensible defaults, or want to understand how to secure your AWS environment, you will need additional resources.