Cloud Application Architectures

Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud

By George Reese
April 2009
Pages: 204
Series: Theory In Practice
ISBN 10: 0-596-15636-7 | ISBN 13: 9780596156367
Press Release
(5) (Average of 1 Customer Reviews)

Description

If you're involved in planning IT infrastructure as a network or system architect, system administrator, or developer, this book will help you adapt your skills to work with these highly scalable, highly redundant infrastructure services. Cloud Application Architectures will help you determine whether and how to put your applications into these virtualized services, with critical guidance on issues of cost, availability, performance, scaling, privacy, and security.
Full Description

If you're involved in planning IT infrastructure as a network or system architect, system administrator, or developer, this book will help you adapt your skills to work with these highly scalable, highly redundant infrastructure services.

While analysts hotly debate the advantages and risks of cloud computing, IT staff and programmers are left to determine whether and how to put their applications into these virtualized services. Cloud Application Architectures provides answers -- and critical guidance -- on issues of cost, availability, performance, scaling, privacy, and security.

With Cloud Application Architectures, you will:

Understand the differences between traditional deployment and cloud computing
Determine whether moving existing applications to the cloud makes technical and business sense
Analyze and compare the long-term costs of cloud services, traditional hosting, and owning dedicated servers
Learn how to build a transactional web application for the cloud or migrate one to it
Understand how the cloud helps you better prepare for disaster recovery
Change your perspective on application scaling

To provide realistic examples of the book's principles in action, the author delves into some of the choices and operations available on Amazon Web Services, and includes high-level summaries of several of the other services available on the market today.

Cloud Application Architectures provides best practices that apply to every available cloud service. Learn how to make the transition to the cloud and prepare your web applications to succeed.

Featured customer reviews

Thank You, Reese and O'Reilly, For Your Impeccable Timing, April 17 2009

Rating:

Submitted by Graeme Thickins [Respond | View]

This is a book that had to be written, and O'Reilly's timing of its publication couldn't be better. It will be gobbled up in this defining year in the mainstreaming of cloud computing. Reese, an experienced O'Reilly author and recognized cloud computing practitioner, delivers a highly readable volume that cuts through all the cloud computing hype to provide real clarity for anyone wanting to better understand this often confusing and frequently derided term. He gives solid, practical advice on how to benefit, today, from this powerful new set of technologies. Cloud computing is a tsunami headed toward old-school corporate computing. Doubters beware. Reese and his O'Reilly editors do a brilliant job covering the bases for anyone "who designs, builds, or maintains web applications that may be deployed into the cloud." But the book's appeal will extend much wider than that -- not only to anyone who manages such technologists, but into C-level suites as well. And I don't just mean the CIO's office. It is an excellent companion purchase to Nicholas Carr's "The Big Switch," delivering the knowledge you and your people need to take the next step -- to actually implement cloud computing.

Chapter 1 is an outstanding overview of the cloud concept and its value to the business enterprise, worth the price of the book alone. Then, Reese delves into an excellent description of the leading provider of cloud computing services today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), including its EC2 and S3 offerings. From there, he describes what you need to know before you move into the cloud, followed by a chapter on getting ready for the cloud. But it's not all sweetness and light. Reese addresses head-on the widely recognized obstacles cited by enterprises to adopting cloud computing today: security and reliability. An entire chapter is devoted to disaster recovery in the cloud, as is scaling a cloud infrastructure. Three excellent appendices round out the book, making it a must for any cloud IT professional's book shelf: an Amazon Web Services reference, plus submissions by technologists at two other leading cloud providers, GoGrid and Rackspace, explaining their offerings. I find it hard to identify anything the book lacks; it appears to cover all the bases business and IT people need -- now -- to take action and start reaping the major costs savings offered by cloud computing. We will undoubtedly see updated editions as changes occur in this field. But do not miss the first printing.

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