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Hi Reader 👋🏽

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

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 👨🏽‍💻

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 📕

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 📽️

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 😉 (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 💌

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 ✌🏽