Learning AWS OpsWorks - Short Book Review

I picked up a copy of Learning AWS OpsWorks during the PacktPub holiday sale. It was cheap, short and covered a AWS product that I’ve never had need to dig in to and knew very little about.

The book takes you through creating a basic stack, the layers inside it and deploying an application to managed instances. Its coverage is very high level and doesn’t really go beyond a cursory explanation of the services used. As you’d expect from the page count, it doesn’t delve in to either the Amazon services you use or how to make chef do your bidding, instead sticking to its focus and giving you just enough information to get the example working and not much else. It’s worth mentioning that the console screen shots are already out of date so you need to do a little exploring on your own as you follow the steps.

Learning AWS OpsWorks is a brief but informative high level overview of AWS OpsWorks and how you’d use it to create and manage basic stacks. I don’t think it’s worth the full price, a Safari account would be quite useful here. It’s also very unlikely you’ll need to read it more than once so it’s not great value for money. It does however present the concepts in an easy to understand way, so if you’re looking to pick up basic OpsWorks in a big rush it’s the only competition to the official docs.