To get the most out of this book

You will need to have a foundational knowledge of what DevOps is, combined with a basic understanding of the key AWS offerings – Identity and Access Management (IAM), the AWS console, and the CLI. Ideally, you will have used AWS or another cloud provider in the past to deploy a sample application or a proof of concept, but it’s not a hard requirement. The hands-on exercises additionally assume basic software engineering skills to comprehend the ready-to-deploy code available in the book’s GitHub repository and work with tools such as git, familiarity with the Linux operating system, and a basic understanding of how the web works. To be able to deploy the hands-on exercises, you will require an active AWS subscription and an IAM user with administrator privileges.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Amazon Web Services (AWS)	Accessed through a web browser (Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge)
Cloud9 IDE – deployed in your AWS account, hosted on a Linux-based server	Linux (managed by AWS)
AWS CDK, npm, git, Docker	Linux (pre-installed on the server that hosts the Cloud9 IDE in your AWS account)

AWS Cloud9 is fully supported on recent versions of Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. You will be using Cloud9 to deploy the hands-on exercises in your AWS account. If you are unable to access the service for some reason, please refer to the following link for troubleshooting information: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloud9/latest/user-guide/troubleshooting.html.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.