Becoming familiar with some basic AWS concepts

As discussed earlier, AWS is one of several competing cloud service providers. For the purpose of this chapter, AWS was chosen because more than any other provider, the platform requires an administrator to adopt a completely different mindset when it comes to managing infrastructure. This different mindset is a healthy one even outside of AWS, so it represents a logical evolution at this point in our journey.

Up until now, we discussed server installations as essentially pets, meaning we want to keep them around, make sure they're healthy, and if something goes wrong, try to fix it. We want to keep our servers operational for as long as possible. We want to be able to rely on them, and that helps our organization—customers and clients appreciate using a website or service that is stable, with minimal or no downtime.

That last part, minimal downtime, doesn't change regardless of the mindset we use when managing...