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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 21 Ratings

Cloud defined, demystified and detailed - 2009-09-18
Reviewer Rating:
Mr Reese has taken on a loaded topic and in less 200 pages he succinctly gets his major points across on that most nebulous term; Cloud Computing.

Starting in the first chapter, Mr Reese begins with his definition of cloud:
1) it must be accessible from a web browser or web service api (non proprietary)
2) 0 capital expenditure to start
3) you pay for only what you use

These simple statements provide the baseline for the rest of the book.

From here he dives right into the meat of the matter. The majority of the book details the things you, and your organization, will need to keep in mind as you move, or contemplate the cloud. Some of this is very obvious; cost of ownership, security, disaster recovery, hardware costs, backup, scaling, etc but Mr Reese pulls out the threads that make the cloud different: both in good ways and bad.

For example, a new wrinkle for cloud is what happens when your cloud provider goes out of business or has a poorly worded injunction exposing all their data (including yours) to the federal government? This is not something you worry about when you own the servers. Mr Reese elegantly explains how you can make this something you don't need to worry about even in the cloud; as long as you use some type of encryption.

Another example of where the cloud provides a potentially huge win would be in disaster recovery. Here a cloud provider provides redundancy of location and with virtual machines you should be easily able to get your system up and running again fairly quickly as long as you've taken the proper precautions (snapshots and a sane backup strategy).

Throughout the entire book, he really drills in security in the cloud. In several of the chapters, not including the security chapter, he keeps coming back to how the little things you do in your design can have a huge impact on your overall security. This is a major worry point and a barrier of entry point for many and Mr Reese spends just the right amount of time explaining how you can truly mitigate the security risks.

Another thread that runs throughout the book is scaling your application. This, to me, is one of the bread and butter wins of cloud computing. Mr Reese talks to some designs that work, and some that don't, when it comes to scaling. While all scaling talk is high level, I believe he succeeds in getting you the reader, to know what questions to ask in your next architecture meeting.

The book is a great overview and it focuses you to ask the right questions when you are dealing with cloud computing. Especially on the Amazon system. Mr Reese takes great pains to point out that yes, he is biased in talking about Amazon since that what he knows. Two appendices do talk about GoGrid and RackSpace but those read more like slick marketing glossies. And that's one of the two failings of the book. The other minor quibble is that a few times Mr Reese tries to go into detail about how something is done on the Amazon cloud (especially EC2 and S3). This is a mistake given how high level this book is. The appendix on the EC2 instructions also seem a little out of place. However these are minor quibbles.

If you are looking for a great introduction to the cloud, what it is and how to think about it, then this is the book for you. If you are looking for something to help you program, interact and learn the API for say Amazon, this is not the book for you.

Clear sky - 2009-10-19
Reviewer Rating:
This is a book that explains a lot of the hype surrounding cloud computing. It also explaines how the Amazon cloud computing services works, although this is also its weakest link. The Amazon services are evolving so fast that the book was almost outdated before going to press. Personally I find the book rather entertaining, but it could benefit from a better and clearer layout/structure.

Good book - 2009-10-12
Reviewer Rating:
If you are looking into building application and infrastructure in the cloud, this book is good to read. Chapter two is dedicated for Amazon Cloud Computing and Appendix A is for Amazon Web Services Reference.

Great stuff! - 2009-09-08
Reviewer Rating:
George Reese's work is quite simply outstanding. First of all, he is concise, he does not tax your time with endless flood of metaphors: he clearly goes to the point, makes it, then moves on to the next.

The book is a must-have for anyone working with Cloud subjects, and its architecture review is something I wish had been published for other subjects as well: extremely applicable, lists trade-offs clearly - what do you get, what do you give, what else can you do, and why.

Pros: Chapter 2 is the best review of AWS operation yet. If you need to understand quickly what Amazon AWS does and does not do, and where the pitfalls are, this is what you should read.

Cons: I do not agree with the ROI analysis presented for cloud, but that cannot be taken against George's work because he is on the industry mainline, I am the outlier (I expect people to account for existing datacenters every company has in the dollar calculations, rather than pitting new vs new on both fronts).

Very Good Introduction to Amazon's Elastic Computing. - 2009-09-03
Reviewer Rating:
I had a need to come up to speed very quickly on Amazon's EC2 and S3 Cloud Computing, and was lucky to find this book on Amazon. It was interesting, easy to understand and has code snippets to actually write the scripts to create, expand and shrink resources. Very useful. For those who have not even had an introduction to Cloud Computing, the first few chapters are a great summary.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Internet/Online
Programming
Software Engineering

Sub-Categories:
Internet/Online > World Wide Web
Programming > .NET
Software Engineering > Architecture
Software Engineering > Capacity Planning and Performance Modeling