Not related to VPC, but I'm a big fan of the author. Loved his book "Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People" when it came out a few years ago. If you know anyone struggling with common data structures and algorithms, this book can make it fun for them.
I was pretty late to the AWS bandwagon (maybe 2019ish) but I had no idea there was a point when your resources were directly addressable by other customers.
I'm surprised they got anyone signing up at all - though I suppose back then having just about everything directly connect to the internet was much more of the norm
It was unironically pretty convenient. You had to manually set up NAT in a VPC for a long time (until they made NAT gateways) and some other early quirks were a pain in the ass. EC2 "classic" still had security groups and it was pretty effortless otherwise for a small deployment since it's connected to the internet from the start.
If you want to read more, it was called "EC2 Classic" (well, it wasn't called that before VPCs were launched!). There was a discussion about it being retired on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988964
My recollection is that for a period of time, as a part of the internal “Move to AWS” (MAWS) campaign, the entire retail business ran within a single VPC. A lot has changed!
I've been thinking about it! Maybe a book that covers the basics of putting an app up on AWS... networking, covering the different options such as EC2, ECS, and fargate, plus a bit about load balancers and IAM.