To get the most out of this book

Before starting, you should understand how you would approach and deploy the infrastructure to support one or more of your existing applications. Ideally, this infrastructure would be hosted in either Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.

While this is optional, the book has been written with the assumption that you have a basic understanding of either Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services and some of the core services’ basic concepts, such as networking or virtual machines. While this is not essential, you may have to do some further reading about why we approached tasks in a certain way regarding some of the more hands-on chapters.

We also assume that you would like to follow along with some of the more practical chapters; therefore, having credits or access to a Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services account that isn’t used to host production resources is a bonus.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Terraform	Windows, macOS, or Linux
Ansible	Windows, macOS, or Linux
The Microsoft Azure CLI and portal	Windows, macOS, or Linux
The Amazon Web Services CLI and portal	Windows, macOS, or Linux
Pulumi	Windows, macOS, or Linux
Visual Studio Code	Windows, macOS, or Linux

There are links to the installation instructions for each tool in the further reading section of the respective chapters.

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.

Finally, feel free to experiment; check out the code accompanying this book and make changes. However, keep an eye on spending and always ensure that you terminate any resources you deploy after you have finished to avoid any unexpected and unwanted costs.