AWS Advent Calendar 2012

While most of us spend our December hunting for those last minute gifts, treats and surprise presents, a small number of techies manage to find the time to write a themed set of articles on certain technical topics that are combined in to an advent calendar. While I’m a little ashamed to say I’ve not yet read the 2012 SysAdvent posts I did have a chance to look at the inaugural, and quite excellent Amazon Webservice Advent 2012

Each post is well written, concise, mostly practical (there are a couple of more high level overview entries but most are immediately applicable) and serves as a perfect jumping on point for someone new to the service being discussed. Even though I normally skim each of the AWS announcements looking for new, useful tools, I still found the explanations and examples to go that little bit further and add to the topic. I even sent a couple of the pages around to co-workers so the could get a head start on certain services.

One of my favourite posts was the primer on Cloudformation. While it’s a technology so ugly only a maven user could love it, you can see the potential (and we have a similar itch that needs scratching in our private cloud at $WORK). It also reminded me of a DSL invented by Ken Barber in a Puppet / OpenNebula presenation (warning: PDF) on slides 46 - 51).

Brandon Burton has created a great little resource that I hope returns again next year.