The Practical Guide to Building and Deploying on the Cloud

Read before you buy: the PDF here is a free sample — the first 20 pages of the 481-page book (payments, sales and reviews on this demo site are sample data). Get the full e-book at thenexbooks on Gumroad.

Build real applications on AWS — with confidence, security, and a bill you understand.

Most developers learn AWS in fragments: a tutorial here, a copied IAM policy there. This book gives you the full picture. You learn the handful of building blocks most applications are made of, why each exists, when to use it (and when not to), and what goes wrong in production — all by building one realistic application, Lumora, an online learning platform, from first deployment to a production-ready, multi-account setup.

• 481 pages · 28 chapters + 4 appendices
• Cloud foundations: accounts, IAM Identity Center, IAM policies and least privilege, SDKs, retries, and pagination
• Compute: EC2, containers on ECS and Fargate, Lambda, API Gateway — and how to choose
• Data: S3, DynamoDB modeling, RDS and Aurora, ElastiCache, Athena and OpenSearch
• Integration: VPC networking, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, CloudFront, Route 53
• DevOps: CloudFormation, SAM, AWS CDK, GitHub Actions with OIDC, safe deployments
• Operations: observability, application security, cost optimization, Well-Architected
• Generative AI with Amazon Bedrock, plus 3 complete end-to-end projects
• TypeScript (SDK v3) and Python (boto3) examples; tips, warnings, exercises, and Key Takeaways in every chapter

Table Of Contents

Part I — Cloud Foundations

• Ch 1 · Why AWS? Cloud Concepts Every Developer Needs
• Ch 2 · Setting Up: Accounts, IAM Identity Center, the AWS CLI, and Budgets
• Ch 3 · IAM in Depth: Identities, Policies, and Least Privilege
• Ch 4 · Programming AWS: SDKs, Credentials, Retries, and Pagination

Part II — Compute

• Ch 5 · Amazon EC2 Essentials for Developers
• Ch 6 · Containers on AWS: ECR, ECS, and Fargate
• Ch 7 · AWS Lambda Fundamentals
• Ch 8 · Building HTTP APIs with API Gateway and Lambda
• Ch 9 · Choosing Compute: EC2, Containers, Serverless, and EKS

Part III — Storage and Data

• Ch 10 · Amazon S3: Object Storage Done Right
• Ch 11 · Amazon DynamoDB: Modeling and Access Patterns
• Ch 12 · Relational Databases: Amazon RDS and Aurora
• Ch 13 · Caching with Amazon ElastiCache
• Ch 14 · Analytics and Search: Athena, Glue, and OpenSearch

Part IV — Integration, Networking, and Delivery

• Ch 15 · Networking with Amazon VPC
• Ch 16 · Messaging and Events: SQS, SNS, and EventBridge
• Ch 17 · Orchestrating Workflows with Step Functions
• Ch 18 · Delivery at the Edge: CloudFront, Route 53, and ACM

Part V — DevOps, Security, and Operations

• Ch 19 · Infrastructure as Code: CloudFormation and AWS SAM
• Ch 20 · Infrastructure as Code with the AWS CDK
• Ch 21 · CI/CD on AWS: Pipelines, GitHub Actions, and Safe Deployments
• Ch 22 · Observability: CloudWatch, X-Ray, and OpenTelemetry
• Ch 23 · Security for Applications: Cognito, Secrets Manager, KMS, and WAF
• Ch 24 · Cost Optimization and the Well-Architected Framework

Part VI — AI and Real-World Projects

• Ch 25 · Generative AI on AWS with Amazon Bedrock
• Ch 26 · Project: The Lumora Serverless Backend
• Ch 27 · Project: The Lumora Grading Service on ECS with CI/CD
• Ch 28 · Project: Production Readiness, Multi-Account Setup, and Next Steps

Appendices

• App A · AWS CLI and SDK Cheat Sheet
• App B · IaC Templates and Service Reference
• App C · Production Checklist
• App D · Glossary

WHO IT IS FOR
Application developers who know JavaScript/TypeScript or Python and want to build and deploy on AWS; backend and full-stack engineers moving to AWS; tech leads who want a practical reference for designing, reviewing, and costing AWS workloads.

FORMAT
PDF (A4), 481 pages, English, clickable table of contents and PDF bookmarks. 1st Edition, 2026. Published by thenexbooks. Independent publication — not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services.

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