Chapter 19. Cloud automation: working with Elastic Beanstalk, Docker, and Lambda
Automation is the running of processes with as little human intervention as possible. This has advantages: humans make dumb mistakes, expect to be paid lots of money, have trouble watching more than one thing at a time, and, if YouTube usage patterns are any indication, are fairly easy to distract. They also often have trouble understanding complex stuff (like how to operate a photocopier).
Automated systems? Not so much.
Cloud computing is all about automating user access to compute and network resources, so it makes sense that the resources themselves should be offered behind an increasingly automated interface. In this chapter, you’ll learn a little about three AWS services, each operating on its own level of automation abstraction:
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk—The infrastructure exists but is hidden from the user.
- Docker on AWS EC2 Container Service—The infrastructure is virtualized.
- AWS Lambda—The infrastructure doesn’t even pretend to exist.
System administrators love diving into new technologies. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning your way around all the AWS services covered in the book so far at least as much as I have. But the world is a large, diverse place filled with all kinds of people—developers, for instance, some of whom prefer writing code over calculating TCP/IP subnets.