Amazon's services are like Lego pieces. If you can picture your final product, then you can explore the different services and start combining them the way you would assemble a Lego kit, in order to build the supporting stack needed to build your product quickly and efficiently. Of course, in this case, the "if" is a big if, and unlike Lego, understanding what each piece can do is a lot less visual and colorful than Lego pieces are. This is why this book is written in a very practical way; throughout the different chapters, we are going to take a web application and deploy it like it's our core product. We will see how to scale the infrastructure supporting it so that millions of people can use it and finally make it more secure. And, of course, we will do this following DevOps best practices.

By going through that exercise, you will learn how AWS provides a number of managed services and systems to perform a number of common tasks such as computing, networking, load balancing, storing data, monitoring, programmatically managing infrastructure and deployment, caching, and queueing.