News

Engineers Publish Open Guide to AWS on GitHub

• By David Ramel
• 10/17/2016

Another resource has emerged on GitHub to help engineers sort out the complex ecosystem of products and services that constitutes the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

We reported earlier that GitHub -- normally used to host open source code projects -- featured a repository called Awesome AWS, "a curated list of awesome AWS libraries, open source repos, guides, blogs and other resources."

Now GitHub hosts the early draft of "The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services," described thusly:

A lot of information on AWS is already written. Most people learn AWS by reading a blog or a "getting started guide" and referring to the standard AWS references. Nonetheless, trustworthy and practical information and recommendations aren't easy to come by. AWS's own documentation is a great but sprawling resource few have time to read fully, and it doesn't include anything but official facts, so omits experiences of engineers. The information in blogs or Stack Overflow is also not consistently up to date.

This guide is by and for engineers who use AWS. It aims to be a useful, living reference that consolidates links, tips, gotchas, and best practices. It arose from discussion and editing over beers by several engineers who have used AWS extensively.

The project provides three types of resources -- basics, tips and gotchas -- for myriad AWS services, ranging from basics such as S3 (storage) and EC2 (computing instances) to other services such as Kinesis Streams (for Big Data ingestion) and the Internet of Things (IoT) service.

As an early-stage draft, the project now primarily focuses on more than 20 AWS core services, with plans to expand into other areas. Designed for both beginners and experienced engineers, it starts out with simple explanatory sections, such as this introduction to the basics of AWS:

The core features of AWS are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) -- that is, virtual machines and supporting infrastructure. Other cloud service models include Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which typically are more fully managed services that deploy customers' applications, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which are cloud-based applications. AWS does offer a few products that fit into these other models, too.

The guide -- unaffiliated with AWS -- "is not a tutorial, but rather a collection of information you can read and return to," spearheaded by Joshua Levy and Thanos Baskous, with the help of more than 40 other contributors.

Project contributors and others use a Slack channel to talk about AWS, and others are invited to help out with the guide, first by reviewing Contributing guidelines to get started