Introduction

Preparing and securing effective on-premises server workloads can be complicated and stressful. Forget about enterprise workloads: most people probably still get nervous configuring port forwarding on a home router. Of course, much of the anxiety can be blamed on the fact that you’re not doing these things every day. Experience breeds confidence.

So when AWS tells you that it has made it easy to provision and launch robust, multilevel application environments, there’s no reason not to believe it. You really can do remarkable things with little more than a couple of mouse clicks. But breaking through the experience barrier can be nearly as hard in the cloud as it was for your engineers working years ago in your own data center.

Well, at least you’re not on your own. AWS provides layers of support designed to help you as you take your first confusing steps on the platform, learn about the many ways you can use AWS services, and struggle to optimize and...