Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a cloud object storage service provided by Amazon Web Services. It’s a powerful public cloud service, usable with public cloud solutions or as a target for some on-prem servers (like backup software). But it’s also becoming a standard interface of object storage and some on-prem solutions may direcly export this service.Compared to other services this require a good understand of API and the SDK in order to use it the right way.This book help in those aspects but using practical examples and sample codes.Chapter 1, Managing Common Operations with AWS SDKs, introduces what AWS SDKs can do with Amazon S3 by using the official AWS SDK sample application code to create S3 buckets and upload, list, get, and download objects into and from a bucket.Chapter 2, Hosting a Static Website on Amazon S3 Bucket, covers a user case of hosting a static website's contents by using a custom domain on Amazon S3 instead of using web servers such as Apache or Nginx on EC2 through a management console (GUI) and AWS CLI (command line).Chapter 3, Calculating Cost with the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator, talks about calculating the total cost of storing data and delivering objects through S3, based on a couple of scenarios.Chapter 4, Deploying a Static Website with CloudFormation, came back with the web site user cases, by deploying a template of a static website with CloudFormation via the S3 console and using AWS CLI.Chapter 5, Distributing Your Contents via CloudFront, talks about delivering a static website on S3 buckets through the CloudFront edge location (CDN), configuring S3 buckets as an origin store to minimize network latency.Chapter 6, Securing Resources with Bucket Policies and IAM, covers managing access to resources such as buckets and objects, configuring bucket policies, and IAM users, groups, and policies.Chapter 7, Sending Authenticated Requests with AWS SDKs, talks about making requests using IAM and federated users' temporary credentials with AWS SDKs to grant permissions to temporarily access Amazon S3 resources.Chapter 8, Protecting Data Using Server-side and Client-side Encryption, deals with encrypting and decrypting your data using server-side and client-side encryption to securely upload and download your contents.Chapter 9, Enabling Cross-origin Resource Sharing, shows you how to enable cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and allow cross-origin access to S3 resources to interact with resources in a different domain for client web applications.Chapter 10, Managing Object Lifecycle to Lower the Cost, talks about configuring lifetime cycle policies on S3 buckets to automatically delete after a certain time, using Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) or by archiving objects into Amazon Glacier.Chapter 11, S3 Performance Optimization, deals with improving the performance of uploading, downloading, and getting and listing objects.Chapter 12, Creating Triggers and Notifying S3 Events to Lambda, covers sending notifications to let AWS Lambda execute Lambda functions that enable S3 event notifications.So several specific users cases, lot of examples, but maybe was nice start with a project and implement it step by step by using all those tools.

Amazon S3 is one of the storage solutions offered by Amazon, as well as one of the first services of the ecosystem to be made publicly available. Despite being almost 10 years old, S3 keeps getting enriched with new features and offers scalability, high availability, and low latency at commodity costs. This makes it the obvious storage choice of everyone working with the Amazon Web Services. Still, despite this and the fact that it's there since 2006, the books dedicated to it are not many. In fact, I don't remember a single title focusing on S3, although, being one of the most basic services among those offered, any book introducing the readers to the ecosystem somehow touches it. On the other hand, it is also true that this lack of titles entirely dedicated to S3 has been compensated by the extensive, and free!, official documentation, which is easy to follow, full of examples and constantly updated. This makes it very hard for any author interested in writing a book about S3, since adding value to what Amazon already does provide is not an easy task. Still, not impossible. Amazon S3 Cookbook, a recently released title, is probably the first book entirely centered on S3.I have reread the whole S3 developers' guide recently. It's good to keep up to date with the latest whistles and bells offered by the service. Then, when I heard that this title was released at the end of August of 2015, I was very excited to get a copy and get through those almost 300 pages. Having the official documentation so fresh in my mind would have allowed me to better evaluate the value of this text. There are indeed things that the developers' guide does not cover. There were questions that I wanted answered. And I wanted this book to provide those answers. Among them, how to organize the files of the many different projects a DevOps manages into S3, through delimiters and prefixes; how to switch from a standard VCS, such as Git, to S3, allowing instances to push, pull and merge without problems; how to allow external users to access to specific resources, limiting their permissions both in space and time. Apart from these questions, there were other generic expectations. Among them, for example, a good coverage of the CLI. There are many bindings specific to different programming languages: Ruby, Java, PHP, Python. What makes everyone happy is the command line. I do honestly expect each book that doesn't explicitly claim to cover a specific language to present the examples through the CLI. Is that asking too much?Before getting into the content of the book a first quick (negative) note: the book is called a cookbook, but it is not. Cookbooks are titles that present recipes that get the reader solving a problem through the winning step-by-step approach. Amazon S3 Cookbook does not provide this typical question-answer scenario.But let's dive into the book itself! The very first thing that caught my eye is something that, unfortunately, is not new to Packt Publishing titles: faulty proofreading. Some of the commands of the examples used to present the service have, indeed, typos. Nothing fancy that the expert eye won't catch. Still, this suggests a quick and cheap proofreading which lowers the overall value of the book.Typos apart, the book feels like more about CloudFormation rather than S3. True, CloudFormation can be on top of S3 and other services, such as EC2 and Auto Scaling. Still, this book should be about S3, not CloudFormation. Chapters 4 and 5, for example, should be probably part of a different title.Another thing that I did not like is the waste of pages dedicated to do stuff through the console, rather than the CLI. In chapter 6, for example, the author takes six pages showing how to set up an IAM user that has administrator's permissions through the console. Six pages plenty of colorful screenshots that take the reader hand by hand in such a delicate and hard process. Very little space is given to do the same with the command line, which is probably the way DevOps will interact with AWS. DevOps love the command line. And coffee.Another thing that leaves a bad taste in the mouth is that concepts are not clearly explained. Let's stay on chapter 6. Chapter 6, as stated, is centered about buckets' policies and IAM. It presents different interesting scenarios of limiting access to the resources, such as granting cross-account bucket permissions. The topics covered are real-world and interesting indeed, but far from being well explained. Let's see why: "First, we create a bucket and attach a bucket policy to the bucket in Account A, and then create an IAM user in Account A and one in Account B. Lastly attach a bucket policy to the bucket owed by Account A". Attaching a bucket policy was the first thing we did, wasn't it?I must admit that when I have finished reading this book I was disappointed. It's not that most of my questions were not answered, but rather that the concepts were not clearly covered. Chapter 7, for example, which is about temporary permissions and thus among those that I was very interested in, got me more puzzled than enlightened. Overall, I don't feel like the book gives more than the official documentation does already.As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!