πŸ“• Inside The CloudWatch Book: Exclusive Updates


πŸ‘€ This is not properly displayed? Read all of our issues online! πŸ’‘

Hi Reader πŸ‘‹πŸ½

in this newsletter, we want to give you insights and progress updates about our upcoming book: The CloudWatch Book πŸ“•

We'll cover why we want to create such a book, what we will cover in the book, and give you a sneak peek into our example application.

Why a CloudWatch Book?

CloudWatch is one of the most essential services in AWS. It gives you the power of having one centralized place for all of your logs, metrics, and alarms, and even gives you more tools to observe your application.

We saw many companies already paying for third-party providers before they even understood what CloudWatch is capable of. Often they even ended up with double the costs, for such simple use cases that could have been fulfilled with CloudWatch only.

This is where we want to educate. We want to showcase how to use CloudWatch in a distributed Cloud application and what it is capable of. This makes the decision of buying a third-party provider vs. using native AWS tooling much easier!

What is included in the CloudWatch Book?

The CloudWatch Book consists of several parts.

Hands-On Project πŸ‘¨πŸ½β€πŸ’»

At the core of our book is a Hands-On Project, featuring a web application to track GitHub repositories - complete with full IAC and business logic code.

We developed a web application for tracking GitHub repositories (stars, languages, etc.). We've included several native AWS Services like Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, S3, and more. With this application, we will show you a real-world example of how to apply observability in a distributed application.

The Book + Infographics πŸ“•

Alongside the book, we offer insightful infographics for key topics. The book will cover all the theoretical knowledge that is necessary to understand CloudWatch. We will include relevant code passages for you to follow along.

For major topics, we have created one-page infographics so that you can get all the information on one page.

You can see the full TOC here.

A Video Course πŸ“½οΈ

Our accompanying video course will guide you through the whole journey of CloudWatch.

In this course, we will:

  • Deploy the whole application in your own AWS Account
  • Go into the details of the Infrastructure-as-Code sections
  • Show each chapter in the AWS console

​

Progress

We're making great progress! Key chapters such as Log Insights, Metrics, Alarms, and Distributed Tracing are going very well.

While each chapter includes more and more development in the hands-on project we are very happy with the progress.

The whole infrastructure is created with Terraform and we are still deciding if we add CDK support as well, but we do think we'll do that πŸ˜‰ (let us know what you think about this, do you need CDK)

Shape the book with us!

If you have specific topics in mind that you want to learn please reach out to us. AWS Fundamentals was a great book because we wrote it together with you.

If you have anything in mind simply reply to this email, and we read every one of them πŸ’Œ

Thank you for being part of our journey. We will keep you posted with more sample chapters, screencasts, and updates about our project.

Have a great week ahead!
Best,
Sandro & Tobi ✌🏽

​

​

AWS for the Real World

Join our community of over 8,800 readers delving into AWS. We highlight real-world best practices through easy-to-understand visualizations and one-pagers. Expect a fresh newsletter edition every two weeks.

Read more from AWS for the Real World

Hey Reader First things first: we apologize for not providing updates on The CloudWatch Book for a while! 😒 Sometimes, things don't go as planned and unexpected obstacles arise. But now, we're back in action, creating videos and putting the final touches on the book's content! πŸŽ₯ Don't just take our word for it! As an early subscriber, here's a free video from one of our favorite chapters: Anomaly Detection πŸ› In this deep-dive, you'll learn how to detect unusual patterns in metrics without...

βŒ› Reading time: 11.5 minutes πŸŽ“ Main Learning: Host Web Applications on AWS with the CloudFront Hosting Toolkit πŸ‘¨πŸ½πŸ’» GitHub Code πŸ“ Blog Post Hey Reader πŸ‘‹πŸ½ Happy New Week! I (Sandro) will attend the Serverless Days in Milano next week where Jeremy Daley will hold the keynote. I look forward to meeting many of you and the overall AWS community. This week's newsletter is all about hosting your frontend on AWS. AWS launched a new way of deploying your frontend to it: The CloudFront Hosting Toolkit....

βŒ› Reading time: 7 minutes πŸŽ“ Main Learning: Visual Regression Testing with AWS CloudWatch Synthetics πŸ‘¨πŸ½πŸ’» GitHub Code πŸ“ Blog Post Hey Reader Keeping your website running smoothly is important.It's also important to keep an eye on its visual appearance and that it doesn't change due to an unwanted change. AWS CloudWatch Synthetic Canaries is a tool that helps you check on your websites (and APIs!) to make sure it’s working well and look as expected. In this newsletter, we’re going to show you...