The Cloud and Amazon Web Services

I am proud to announce my series of screencasts on The Cloud and Amazon Web Services. It’s published by the good people at Pragmatic Programmers.

“The Cloud” is a buzzword that’s been hyped and overused. We’ll cut through the marketing cruft with a series that starts with the basic concepts behind cloud computing and guides you through practical, hands-on examples using Amazon’s cloud offerings.

This six-episode series targets users who are new to the cloud, with content tailored for novice to mid-range expertise levels. Jesse’s material is useful for both developers and managers. The preview video has more information about which sections are best for each audience. The series covers the main Amazon Web Services’ technologies like EC2 and S3. It also covers the lesser known, but incredibly useful technologies like Elastic Load Balancer, CloudFront, Elastic MapReduce, and Relational Database Service. Each episode covers several Amazon Web Services technologies, discusses the theories behind them, and presents practical exercises.

You’ll learn how to leverage the cloud in the same way Jesse did when he developed The Million Monkeys Project. He used cloud computing resources to simulate the proverbial “million monkeys” at a typewriter, randomly churning away until they’d re-created all of Shakespeare’s works.

The cloud makes resources available to your shop that were traditionally available only to larger IT shops. This allows someone in their basement or a startup to leverage and use the same infrastructure as the larger IT shops. You’ll learn about engineering for this new infrastructure, security considerations, how to use map-reduce (with Hadoop), pricing models, and more. Pick up the entire set and you’ll have the right information for every member of your organization.