Product Description

Building on the success of its storefront and fulfillment services, Amazon now allows businesses to 'rent' computing power, data storage and bandwidth on its vast network platform. This book demonstrates how developers working with small- to mid-sized companies can take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Flexible Payments Service (FPS), and SimpleDB to build web-scale business applications. With AWS, Amazon offers a new paradigm for IT infrastructure: use what you need, as you need it, and pay as you go. "Programming Web Services" explains how you can access Amazon's open APIs to store and run applications, rather than spend precious time and resources building your own.With this book, you'll learn all the technical details you need to: store and retrieve any amount of data using application servers, unlimited data storage, and bandwidth with the Amazon S3 service; buy computing time using Amazon EC2's interface to requisition machines, load them with an application environment, manage access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as needed; use Amazon's web-scale messaging infrastructure to store messages as they travel between computers with Amazon SQS; leverage the Amazon FPS service to structure payment instructions and allow the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers; and, create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results using Amazon SimpleDB. Scale up or down at a moment's notice, using these services to employ as much time and space as you need. Whether you're starting a new online business, need to ramp up existing services, or require an offsite backup for your home, "Programming Web Services" gives you the background and the practical knowledge you need to start using AWS. Other books explain how to build web services. This book teaches businesses how to take make use of existing services from an established technology leader.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #140291 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 581 pages

About the Author
James Murty is a software developer with extensive experience creating web-based applications and architectures using Java. With a working background spanning a research institute, a small software house and various corporations he has a broad perspective on both the promise and the difficulties inherent in networked applications.

Most recently James has been excited to see the rise of web applications and services that provide compelling new tools and new ways of approaching old problems. While experimenting in this area he created JetS3t, an open source library and application suite that is the leading Java implementation available for Amazon's S3 data storage service.

Customer Reviews

A fine book for anyone who is seriously interested in using Amazon to outsource application infrastructure. Highly recommended.
Amazon Web Services are a constantly expanding series of infrastructure services targeted to web developers who want to outsource parts of their application infrastructure. These services are meant to be reliable, scalable and cost-effective. Especially as far as reliability is concerned, however, Amazon Web Services - together with Google App Engine - have recently been regarded as a bit controversial, due to some downtime episodes. Nonetheless, services such as these provide a gate to the future of the Internet, where owners of small and medium web sites, who can't afford to build some high-quality services on their own, can easily outsource them.

Programming Amazon Web Services is the ideal primer to Amazon outsourcing services. It provides a general view of everything Amazon currently offers, including some services in the beta testing phase, as well as the necessary amount of in-depth coverage of each service.

A programmer who never outsourced any part of its infrastructure might not be much confident using APIs which abstract tasks such as database access and data storage (even though it would be a good practice to use some sort of API also for locally-provided services). To help in this situations, this book kicks off with an explanation on how to think an application, with an appreciated overview of REST-based APIs, remote requests and XML documents and their handling; at the same time, the author tells you how Amazon thinks you should build your application to effectively take advantage of what they provide.

After this introductory part, the whole book is dedicated to the exploration of each service: Simple Stoage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Queue Service, Flexible Payments Service and SimpleDB. Every section provides an explanation on what the service is and how it works, including not only its advantages but also the possible problems which may arise by using it. There's also some API references and, best of all, a lot of interesting code examples. Amazon Web Services can be used in any programming language so, even though the examples in this book are written in Ruby, it's easy to understand them and "port" them to your favourite language. Moreover, there are libraries around which allow a more abstracted usage of ABS: for instance, CPAN hosts several Amazon-related modules for the Perl language.

All in all, Programming Amazon Web Services this is a fine book for anyone who is seriously interested in using Amazon to outsource application infrastructure. Highly recommended.