Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly))

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 start3) you pay for only what you useThese 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.

Book provides a good overview of cloud architectures and best practices, with a slant towards architecting transactional web-based systems for security, failure recovery, and so on. Heavy emphasis on Amazon S3, EC2 and related offerings, so if you are curious about deploying to Amazon's cloud, a good overview. Nice short book at 150 pages, easy to read in a few settings. But if you are new to this space, a good overview doesn't need to be 1000 pages to get you going. Also contains a couple of appendices that describe Amazon APIs and other cloud ISPs such as Rackspace. I recommend this book if you are looking at a quick overview of architectures and discussion of issues you need to think about to deal with security, data integrity, costs, disaster recovery. Your choice of cloud provider may not be Amazon, but these issues need to be considered regardless.

My first review of this book seems to have disappeared.I am used to a data center environment. I wanted a quick offline guide( while travelling) to get me started on Amazon Cloud offerings.I am utterly disappointed in this book.couple of gaping issues.1) In page 23 the author says the following about Amazon SimpleDB. That it is a "baseline relational storage". One dosent need to have read the Dynamo paper or detailed research to realize that its an amateurish statement. "Amazon SimpleDB is a highly available, scalable, and flexible NON-RELATIONAL data store" as stated in the first line of the official SimpleDB page. If you don't know what relational DB means, why do you write a book on architecture ?2) In the chapter 'Ready for the Cloud' the author attempts to introduce concepts such as optimistic locking without realizing that its a well known concept and that it has standard terminology. I am sorry, this concept is rudimentary to application development. I don't see why this was cherry picked. More importantly it has nothing specific to do with the clould/AWS.3) The topics on Reliability and Availability is another example of bad introduction to concepts.And finally, its a total bore to read. Unless you come from a non-technical ( non computer science ) background and looking for a Dummies book, this is not for you. Even so, I would probably not recommend this. Its a total bore to read and it suffers from over-complication and over-simplification at the same time.This should have been a series of blog posts, at best. Not a book.ArunSoftware Architect

I finished reading Cloud Application Architectures a couple weeks ago and I enjoyed it a lot. The first chapter is a nice introduction to cloud computing and why it rocks. You could pretty much talk any CEO into drinking the cloud computing cool-aid with the contents of chapter one.The book is geared toward the Amazon web services stack, but that actually works well for me since that's what I am interested in. I should note that the concepts are still sound and can be applied to other cloud services.I already have a background of server administration, but this book showed me that the rules change when deploying in the cloud. Security is very different and George points out several security related issues and several highly recommended security precautions such as encrypting data and file systems.There is also discussion of performance and which services are best for what types of use. For example, S3 is slow while elastic storage blocks are fast.The book has an appendix that covers the EC2 commands. I found this to be helpful when messing with EC2 from a command line.Overall, this book is a great read and it's a pretty quick read. There's lots of good information. I highly recommend this book!

I purchased this book as recommend by a friend, so I already knew about its content, yes, I am happy with this book, I recommend.ThanksAgy

not good

The second part of the author's biography is incorrect, and figures 2-1 and 6-1 are missing from the book.The correct information and diagrams can be found here:[...]

good book