Resilience and Reliability on AWS

Cloud services are just as susceptible to network outages as any other platform. This concise book shows you how to prepare for potentially devastating interruptions by building your own resilient and reliable applications in the public cloud. Guided by engineers from 9apps—an independent provider of Amazon Web Services and Eucalyptus cloud solutions—you’ll learn how to combine AWS with open source tools such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis.

This isn’t a book on theory. With detailed examples, sample scripts, and solid advice, software engineers with operations experience will learn specific techniques that 9apps routinely uses in its cloud infrastructures.

• Build cloud applications with the "rip, mix, and burn" approach
• Get a crash course on Amazon Web Services
• Learn the top ten tips for surviving outages in the cloud
• Use elasticsearch to build a dependable NoSQL data store
• Combine AWS and PostgreSQL to build an RDBMS that scales well
• Create a highly available document database with MongoDB Replica Set and SimpleDB
• Augment Redis with AWS to provide backup/restore, failover, and monitoring capabilities
• Work with CloudFront and Route 53 to safeguard global content delivery

Jurg van Vliet graduated from the University of Amsterdam in Computer Science. After his internship with Philips Research, he worked for many web startups and media companies. Passionate about technology, he wrote for many years about it and its effects on society. He became interested in the cloud and started using AWS in 2007. After merging his former company, 2Yellows, with a research firm, he decided to start 9Apps, an AWS boutique that is an AWS solution provider and silver partner of Eucalyptus, together with Flavia. Give Jurg a scalability challenge, and he will not sleep until he solves it—and he will love you for it.

Flavia Paganelli has been developing software in different industries and languages for over 14 years, for companies like TomTom and Layar. She moved to The Netherlands with her cat after finishing an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Buenos Aires. A founder of 9Apps, Flavia loves to create easy-to-understand software that makes people’s lives easier, like the Decaf EC2 smartphone app. When she is not building software, she is probably exercising her other passions, like acting or playing capoeira.

Jasper Geurtsen has been a pragmatic software developer for over 15 years. After programming embedded systems for many years, like the TomTom devices, he co-founded 9apps. This brought him into a world with an infinite supply of cloud computing resources. He loves making all kind of systems work together with other fun people. When he is not making systems work, Jasper enjoys going to music concerts, hiking and camping with his girlfriend and their two children.