My first experience with Amazon Web Services was on March 14, 2006. I had seen a press release announcing a new web-based storage service called Simple Storage Service (S3), and I remember thinking how strange it seemed that Amazon would be offering such a service. Nevertheless, I signed up for an account and started reading the documentation.
I was blown away by S3. The simple, affordable pricing model. The elegant REST API. The virtually unlimited storage capacity. Amazing. The only thing that could make this any better, I thought to myself, would be a Python interface! That day I started coding what would become the boto library, which is what we will use in this book to interface with Amazon Web Services.
I still believe that Python is a great language for interacting with AWS and other cloud services. The fantastic standard libraries that come with all Python installations (Batteries Included!), the vast collection of modules available for quick download via the Python Cheese Shop, and the ability to work interactively with cloud services, trying requests and immediately seeing the results, combine to provide a powerful and fun way to develop applications and control your cloud-based infrastructure.
I've always found that the best way to learn something new is to see lots of examples. That’s what this little book will focus on: solutions to many common problems related to EC2 and S3 (using Python and boto). I hope you find it useful!
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