Jeff Barr’s book on AWS is a very readable howto and a quick way to get started with EC2, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch and SimpleDB.  It is short on theory, but long on all the details of really getting your hands dirty.  Learn how to:

• get started using the APIs to spinup servers
• create a load balancer
• add and remove application servers
• build custom AMIs
• create EBS volumes, attach them to your instances & format them
• snapshot EBS volumes
• use RAID with EBS
• setup CloudWatch to monitor your instances
• setup triggers with CloudWatch to enable AutoScaling

I would have liked to see examples in Chef rather than PHP, but hey you can’t have everything!

Review: Host Your Web Site In The Cloud by Jeff Barr

Related posts:

1. 5 Steps to Cloud Computing
2. Introduction to EC2 Cloud Deployments
3. Part 8: RAC/Linux/Firewire – Review of Clustered Features + Architecture