"Fill In The Blank"

We've been plannin' this weekend for a week and a half
Hope you ain't thinkin' that we're movin' too fast
This trip can be whatever you want it to
I'll pick where we go and you can pick what we do
We could
In the water, in the truck
On a blanket 'til the sun comes up
With each other on the river bank
Yeah I'll leave it up to you, baby fill in the blank
I know a little spot thirty miles outta town
We can do what we want, won't be nobody around
I love hanging with your friends and your family too
But there's some things that only two people should do
We could
In the water, in the truck
On a blanket 'til the sun comes up
With each other on the river bank
Yeah I'll leave it up to you, baby fill in the blank
We could
In the water, in the truck
On a blanket 'til the sun comes up
With each other on the river bank
Yeah I'll leave it up to you, baby
We could
To some music real slow
'Til we can't no more
If the clouds roll in we could, in the rain
Yeah I'll leave it up to you, baby fill in the blank
Yeah the options are endless, baby fill in the blank
Oh Yeah

This blog is designed with one purpose in mind: to make it easy for you, the reader, to understand and begin using Amazon Web Services (AWS) — an emerging technology platform that is profoundly disrupting the technology industry and enabling hundreds of thousands of individuals, businesses, and nonprofit organizations to gain easy access to on-demand computing resources.

In a sense, this blog is an extension of my earlier blog Virtualization For Beginner, which has a chapter describing “The Future of Virtualization.” In my research to identify which direction virtualization would take, I came across Amazon Web Services, a then-new offering was referred to by Amazon employees as Infrastructure as a Service. To indicate how briefly this new type of computing has been available, the term cloud computing was still more than a year away when Virtualization For Beginner was published.

As I spoke to Amazon representatives about the company’s new offering, I experienced the same reaction I had when first exposed to open source software — a visceral response that made me ask out loud: “If this service is available to users, who will stick with the old way of doing things?”

Nothing in the subsequent years has changed my mind — in fact, that experience strengthens my conviction that cloud computing in general, and Amazon Web Services in particular, will transform the way applications are designed and built. I’ve worked with people from many companies who have resigned themselves to the length of the usual IT resource provisioning process — taking six weeks or more to obtain a virtual machine. When I demonstrate the ability of AWS to provision an instance (Amazon’s term for a virtual machine) in ten minutes or less, these people regard what they’re seeing with disbelief, staggered that the conventional (lengthy) provisioning process isn’t somehow set in stone.

Amazon continues to challenge the incumbent community of technology vendors, releasing new services and cutting prices at an unrelenting pace.

I fully expect that a decade from now, AWS will be one of the top two or three global technology vendors, and that a number of today’s giants will be gone, driven out of business, or into forced mergers by their inability to compete on Amazon’s terms.

But (there’s always a but, isn’t there?) how to get started is a challenge that many people face when they consider using AWS. AWS documentation is quite thorough, but you won’t find there a general guide for beginners to start from scratch and develop new skills.

For this reason, I proposed this blog to the publisher. I’ve heard from many people who are excited about using AWS but frustrated about how to learn about and use AWS. The Powers That Be at Wiley and I agreed that an introductory blog about AWS that helps newbies begin using it productively would be extremely useful — and so we set to work to create the blog that you now hold in your hands. I hope that you’ll find it a useful and helpful roadmap for your AWS journey.