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 29 Ratings

Excellent introduction to cloud computing. - 2010-02-01
Reviewer Rating:
If the film The Graduate were set today, Mr. McGuire's career advice for Ben Braddock might not be one word: "plastics," but two words: "cloud computing."

So what is cloud computing? It is an arrangement whereby the end user's computer does not need to hold within itself all of the data or software programs and applications that are being used. Instead, the end user is accessing and leveraging third-party systems that are "in the cloud," which is another way of saying remotely connected via the Internet. Anyone who has used Google Mail or Google Docs has used cloud computing.

The beauty of cloud computing is that by leveraging someone else's resources, users can typically save money. Companies that need to quickly set up data centers or expand existing infrastructures can do that less expensively with cloud computing.

For complex environments, setting up cloud computing arrangements will not necessarily be easy. In Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud, author George Reese provides a valuable overview to the topic and details his experiences--both successes and failures--around cloud computing.

As a new physical model for corporate computing, cloud computing requires a completely new approach to security, privacy, and disaster recovery compared to current models. The book thankfully dedicates a number of chapters to these important topics. The book notes that if done correctly, security in the cloud can actually be better than in an internal data center, so the move to cloud computing can result in a high-security computing infrastructure.

The challenge, of course, is do-ing it right. For those who want a brief but serious introduction to cloud computing, Cloud Application Architectures provides an excellent introduction and overview to this important computing environment.

Good book on AWS type cloud computing - 2010-02-01
Reviewer Rating:
This is a good introduction to Infrastructure as a Service type cloud computing with a focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Just about the right level of detail to get an idea of what AWS and cloud computing is about along with a thoughtful treatment on some of the key issues and trade-offs. This is not a detailed how-to book.

ok for app developers, no answers to infrastructure ops questions, insufficient on financials - 2010-01-16
Reviewer Rating:
Being in charge of a midsized IT unit (600 people), I was looking for answers around cloud. This book might be indeed very interesting for any software developer interested in developing against the cloud.

It does not aswer, however, questions from professionals about integrating cloud computing in a productive and heterogeneous enterprise environment.

I couldn't find answers about things like patching (do you get a new AMI if the underlying OS needs patching? How do you test after patching, etc.), user management, monitoring, questions about SLA, etc.

Furthermore, the chapter about the financial aspects might be appropriate - albeight tiny - for a one-server shop or for a startup, but it is definetly not suitable for a 500-1000+ server shop (at least not if you already are using virtualization technologies extensively).

To bring an example, the statement made in the book "in the cloud you don't incur capital costs" is so superficial to become just wrong. Even in the cloud there are well capital costs, but the pricing model is set up to mask them to the final user. Any "legacy"-IT can set up its services the very same way, where final users pay a rental price per time unit for use of any server instance. Truth is, the cloud allows a variabilization of capital costs, but this is only interesting if the load of your servers in not constant over time (i.e. load peaks or sporadic usage).

In a nutshell, if your are a CIO and are looking for answers to enterprise deployment of cloud computing, this book will not bring you further.

Too amazon specific - 2010-01-26
Reviewer Rating:
Amazon cloud is probably the most mature but it is no where close to the potential. Overall a good book but too Amazon specific

Need an Amazon EC2 and S3 user manual? - 2010-01-23
Reviewer Rating:
This book is more of an Amazon EC2 and S3 user manual than covering Cloud Application Architecture in general.

Having said that I did find that it still did have some good content although in many areas it was very high level. Some diagrams were also missing from my copy.

There was a good Cloud Computing and Amazon Web Services overview. Cloud ROI, Monitoring & Management, and reiteration that Laws need to be considered were also covered, as were development implications, and in particular multiple-server transaction management.

If you want an overview of Amazon Web Services, EC2 and S3 then this book may be right for you.

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