Resilience and Reliability on AWS - book review

With a title like Resilience and Reliability on AWS I had quite high expectations for this slim book. Unfortunately, they were not met.

The first four chapters provide brief introductions to AWS and some of its more popular services. While these were fine I’d point people looking for this level of information at the Amazon Webservice Advent 2012 instead. Following this are a handful of more cookbook like chapters that each present a small amount of theory and advice about how to run a given applications on AWS - interspaced with multiple pages of python code. The chapters don’t go in to enough details to bring much value to their subjects and the code detracts from the narrative without bringing much technical insight. I was particularly irked at the commented out sections - if you’re going to publish a lot of code in a small book then at least be conscious that each line should bring something to the table.

It feels like this book should have been a series of blog posts rather than a printed book. Very disappointing and not recommended. Programming Amazon EC2 Programming Amazon EC2 by the same authors is much better.