Book excerpt: If you plan to use Amazon Web Services to run applications in the cloud, the end-to-end approach in this book will save you needless trial and error. You'll find practical guidelines for designing and building applications with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and a host of supporting AWS tools, with a focus on critical issues such as load balancing, monitoring, and automation. How do you move an existing application to AWS, or design your application so that it scales effectively? How much storage will you require? Programming Amazon EC2 not only helps you get started, it will also keep you going once you're successfully positioned in the cloud. This book is a must-read for application architects, developers, and administrators. Determine your application's lifecycle and identify the AWS tools you need Learn how to build and run your application as part of the development process Migrate simple web applications to the cloud with EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and CloudFront content delivery Meet traffic demand with EC2's Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing Decouple your application using Simple Queue Service, Simple Notification Service, and other tools Use the right tools to minimize downtime, improve uptime, and manage your decoupled system "Jurg and Flavia have done a great job in this book building a practical guide on how to build real systems using AWS." --Werner Vogels, VP & CTO at Amazon.com