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 23 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.

Rushed and immature - 2009-11-16
Reviewer Rating:
I picked up this book really looking forward to the premise. Sadly the book was a let down on a number of fronts. Specifically:
The focus on Amazon AWS really detracted from general discussion of the cloud. Surely the edit could have rounded out the common refrain of you could do this with S3 but I'm not sure about anyone else.
There are a large number of missing diagrams in my print.
The author tends to lay out the flaws of traditional infrastructure followed by cloud issues with the same design problem. It makes you feel as though the cloud is only ready to be sold, not used in anger.
Repetition was common enough to be noticeable.
What is the point of Appendix A (a reference guide to the aws command line tools)? I'm trying to architect solutions not write operations manuals!

In fairness there is some good discussion about the approach to availability and some techniques for applying cloud solutions. However O'Reilly and the author could both do better than this rushed and flawed effort.

Only relevant to Amazon Cloud - 2009-11-15
Reviewer Rating:
All it talks about is Amazon's EC2, S3, MapReduce. It does not talk about "Application Architecture". It does not have ideas about how to break up traditional programs into MapReduce paradigm. It should be called Cloud Operations Architecture. If it was named by that title, I'd give it 5 stars. The book itself is not bad, but it will get obsolete very quickly due to its specificity to Amazon.
subtitle should be :Building Applications and Infrastructure in Amazon Cloud

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.

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