Preface

If you’ve ever struggled to learn a new technology, you’ll feel my pain. My first AWS experience, close to a decade ago, was ultimately successful, but the process was deeply frustrating. I was looking for a way to run some remote interactive classes for a group of my former high school students. None of the video-conferencing hosting platforms at the time matched our needs or budget, but there was (and still is) an attractive open source package called BigBlueButton. A bit of research suggested that dropping BigBlueButton into an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance might be the way to make it all happen.

It worked—but not before leading me down one conceptual rabbit hole after another as I struggled to figure out how to bring together all the many moving parts. A smarter guy would have been quicker to grasp the grand structure. Not me. I did it through sheer force of will. Hard work? You bet. But very satisfying.

So I know exactly how hard mastering a big, complex new platform can be. More to the point: because I’ve been through this before (many times), I’ve become pretty good at breaking down complex technologies and organizing all the parts. Once I’ve got a comprehensible structure, I can then present the ideas in a way that’s practical and useful.

In a way, this book is the record of how I wished my learning had progressed all those years ago. Having the schematic diagrams, context-rich sidebars, and layer-by-layer buildup of skills would have made my life easier.