Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud: Transactional Systems for EC2 and Beyond (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly))

George Reese

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0596156367 ISBN 13: 9780596156367

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, 2009

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.

Book Description:

Transactional Systems for EC2 and Beyond

Synopsis:

Cloud computing is already a significant force in modern computing, and is drawing particular interest as a way to set up a web-based company quickly while saving money and administrative headaches. There are many competing clouds services, but all of them raise legitimate fears and questions among web site managers and programmers. They hope to cut costs radically by using the cloud, but worry about security, reliability, and the ability to predict load and capacity. This book directly addresses those questions and provides practical planning and strategies. Author George Reese is a pioneer in the area of building transactional web applications, specializing in Amazon's services. Drawing on his experience setting up sites for many clients, he explains the differences between traditional server hosting and using cloud services.

He then provides practical guidelines for key decisions and planning required of system administrators, system architects, and application designers, including: hardware, software, and administrative costs; application architecture; creating and cloning machine images; licensing issues and considerations in using open source software; types of storage, reliability, and availability; backups and disaster recovery; performance, scaling, capacity planning, and service Level Agreements (SLAs); security, encryption, and regulatory issues; database clustering and replication; server monitoring; planning the use of both Windows and open-source applications; and examples of procedures using Amazon cloud services, with some coverage of Windows Azure.