Ask HN: What would you like to see in a book about AWS System Administration?

I am currently writing a book on AWS System Administration, which will be an overview of AWS from a sysadmin/DevOps perspective. It is primarily aimed at sysadmins/devs who want to make sure they are using AWS in the most efficient way possible - "efficient" in this context includes application performance, management overhead and financial outlay.

The book will cover such things as efficient application design, deployment strategies and workflows that should help automate the administration of an AWS application. I have a fair amount of experience with AWS, but obviously that pales in comparison compared to the experience of the wider HN community, so I would love to get some input.

If you could take a moment to answer some of these questions, you will be helping me make the book as useful as possible.

- What topics would you like to see in a book about AWS?

- Which aspects of AWS have you or your team found most challenging?

- Do you have a full-time sysadmin, or do your devs handle sysadmin tasks?

- How do you manage the process of deploying updates to your application?

- Do you use CloudFormation?

- Do you use configuration management tools like Puppet/Chef/etc.? How do you manage configuration updates?

- How much time have you invested in reducing your AWS bill? Spot instances? Reserved instances? Do you use a third-party cost-analyis tool, or calculate things manually?

- What do you use for monitoring your application? Home-grown, SaaS (Datadog, New Relic) or off-the-shelf (Nagios, Munin, etc.)

If you would like to help but don't want to post this information publicly, please drop me an email (address in profile).

If you are doing something smart with AWS, and would like to have your app/infra used as a case study, do get in touch.

Thanks,

Mike