Thank you for purchasing the MEAP of AWS CloudFormation in Action. I hope you learn a lot from the book and enjoy reading it!

I am writing the book to address needs of IT operators, system administrators, systems engineers, developers, and DevOps engineers. I am hoping you will have a basic understanding of AWS in areas like AMIs and Instance Types, Networking and VPCs, Security Groups and NACLs, Availability Zones and Regions, Amazon CloudWatch, basics of DNS, Linux and Shell commands. Some previous work with JSON will be very helpful.

Even without a comprehensive understanding of all these things, or long work history with AWS, I think you will succeed in learning CloudFormation with the examples in the book and the references it provides to AWS documentation.

The book is meant to provide comprehensive, step-by-step learning of CloudFormation. AWS provides great documentation, and the web is loaded with blogs containing topical information and examples of CloudFormation functionality.  This book attempts to fill in the blanks left by the AWS documentation and go beyond what is described in blogs about particular CloudFormation topics. I’ve tried to make each chapter build on the previous, with topics and examples, including CloudFormation templates you can download and experiment with on GitHub.

The book is divided into three parts.

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