Cloud computing, if used properly, is a technology with tremendous promise and potential opportunity for businesses of all sizes. Yet it’s a challenge for IT and business executives today to get a clear understanding of this technology while being overloaded by hype and often inaccurate information peddled by self-serving vendors and analysts.
How do you clear up the confusion; get past the fear, uncertainty, and doubt; and understand how and when the cloud best serves your organization’s goals and needs?
IT organizations face numerous challenges and operate with increasingly large workloads. Severe budgetary and headcount constraints are other banes. This is why we believe it’s a survival imperative to be able to appropriately harness the cloud as a potential new power tool for the IT toolbox.
The hype is more extreme than with previous IT fads or disruptions. This is because today, the industry is much bigger, and many more new vendors are chasing what is to them the next shiny new opportunity. Consequently, hype is overshadowing reality. This is making it next to impossible for responsible IT managers and business decision-makers to get a clear understanding of what the cloud really means, what it might do for them, when it’s practical, and what their future with the cloud looks like. But don’t let this hype discourage you from what has enormous potential benefi ts for your business. We aim to help cut through all this fog and help you make these critical decisions based on facts and our informed, unbiased recommendations and predictions.
This book is for business managers, IT managers, IT architects, CIOs, CTOs, CEOs, IT strategy decision-makers, and all potential cloud services buyers. Cloud computing will be the disruptive technology of this new decade. As in the early stages of every previous major disruption of the IT industry, there is confusion, hype, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. This book aims to cut through the hype to give you a clear, unbiased view of the technology and its immense potential opportunity for you and your business. The following is a more detailed breakdown of the roles and responsibilities of the target audience.
You were the first users of all previous IT disruptive technologies. You have development teams and a set of business drivers that cause you to be innovative and experimental. You get frustrated at the six-plus months it takes IT to provision new servers you request. You’ve discovered that you can provision what you need in the cloud in 10 minutes. This sets up conflicts with central IT, especially in these days of heightened governance and regulation. Consequently, you’re hungry to learn about the cloud vis-à-vis your large enterprise issues.
Your budgets are down, yet your workload keeps going up. Although you constantly hear about the cloud, you know only a little about it. But you’re inundated by the hype mills and can’t figure out what is real. Your knee-jerk reaction toward it is doubt. You need a quick, easy way to get to the truth of what it means for you and when the time is right for you to get in.
Senior corporate officers are risk averse and have sober responsibilities to protect your organizations. But at the same time, you don’t want to miss an opportunity to get an advantage before your competitors. You don’t want the technical details, only the “so whats” and the truth about the cloud. This book will appeal very directly to you and arm you with critical information to assess what your staff is telling you.
You work with or for the IT folks above or perhaps you’re consultants brought in to help the IT organization make a strategic move to the cloud. You need a resource explaining all the facts and trends clearly without technical jargon to help you help your bosses make these hard decisions and decide the time when they need to be made.
This category covers everyone else not covered earlier, if you’re in the market to buy cloud services, especially if you’re a small or medium-sized business. You want to learn about a new IT phenomenon that may help you. Amazon Web Services already has 600,000 small and medium-sized companies as active customers and is continuing to grow quickly. This book is different from other books on the market about cloud computing because it genuinely helps you get to the point of what about the cloud may mean to you, when it may fi t your IT strategy, and how you go about getting there without being loaded down with programming details you don’t want or need.
If you’re a professional programmer or a cloud expert, this book isn’t designed to be your primary resource. You may still decide to add it to your bookshelf, but you’ll need other books that get into details about various APIs, libraries, and frameworks you’ll want to consider using.
Having said that, this book may help give you the perspective of the previously listed job descriptions. They’re most likely your bosses or clients, and knowing how they think and how they’re approaching the cloud will help make your job easier.
This nine-chapter book covers everything you need to know about shifting some or all of your enterprise IT operations to the cloud. We’ve broken it into a few chapters of introduction to the cloud, how it works, and the business case for it. Going deeper into the technology, we discuss how to set up a private cloud, how to design and architect new applications that will take advantage of the cloud’s unique aspects, and how the cloud changes the way you test, deploy, and operate applications. The concluding chapters include a series of practical considerations you’ll want to think about before migrating to or developing for the cloud, and our take on what the future holds for cloud computing.
More specifics about what to expect from these nine chapters are outlined here.
Chapter 1, “What is cloud computing?” provides a general overview of the concepts of cloud computing. It touches briefly on the evolution of cloud computing and the growing importance of cloud computing as a boon for enterprises.
Chapter 2, “Understanding cloud computing classifications,” provides an understanding of the technological underpinnings of cloud computing. It presents a framework for understanding the various types of cloud providers and gives an overview of their capabilities. It ends with a brief discussion on how to choose a cloud provider.
Chapter 3, “The business case for cloud computing,” discusses the economic implications of cloud-based computing. It starts with a simplified comparison of different implementation models. Next, we look at specific examples of the cost benefit/ROI of cloud-based implementations for different sizes of organizations.
Chapter 4, “Security and the private cloud,” deals with the number-one issue preventing people from adopting the cloud: security. The primary question is, “Will my data be safe?” The short answer is that security will be as much up to your policies, procedures, and careful software engineering as it ever was. Yes, in some (rare) instances, there is zero room for mistakes (for example, data related to national security), and a private cloud is warranted. As a step toward full public-cloud computing, some large enterprises are turning their existing (sunk-cost) data centers into private clouds. Why do they want to do this? Is it a good idea?
Chapter 5, “Designing and architecting for cloud scale,” discusses the unique aspects of high-scale applications and how to design and architect them so they can handle the full onslaught of the entire world using your application.
Chapter 6, “Achieving high reliability at cloud scale,” covers topics related to using cheap hardware in high volumes and how to deal with the expected failures of such hardware gracefully while continuing to give good service to a potentially huge number of users.
Chapter 7, “Testing, deployment, and operations in the cloud,” relates to the fact that the cloud represents a different environment in which to operate from the way things are done in internal IT data centers. This chapter discusses those differences in the areas of how applications are tested, deployed, and then operated in a production scenario.
Chapter 8, “Practical considerations,” looks at the practical considerations involved in running successful applications in the cloud. Beginning with the technical and business challenges that you must consider, it moves on to a discussion of the most important operational issues.
Chapter 9, “Cloud 9: the future of the cloud,” discusses the future evolution of cloud computing and forecasts how the technology will evolve over the next two decades.
Purchase of The Cloud at Your Service includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the authors and from other users. To access the forum and subscribe to it, point your web browser to www.manning.com/TheCloudatYourService. This page provides information on how to get on the forum once you are registered, what kind of help is available, and the rules of conduct on the forum.
Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the authors can take place. It is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the authors, whose contribution to the AO remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the authors some challenging questions lest their interest stray! The Author Online forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.
JOTHY ROSENBERG has a PhD in computer science from Duke University in the area of computer-aided design. He remained at Duke as professor of computer science until he became an entrepreneur. Jothy went on to found seven high-tech startups in areas ranging from distributed computing application management to massively parallel supercomputers to web services monitoring and security.
Most recently, Jothy was technical director for BAE Systems, running several major DARPA contracts and helping BAE develop cloud computing expertise. Before that, he ran IT investments for Angle Technology Ventures, commercializing university IP into new startups and creating two companies in that process (Aguru and Mogility). Previously, Jothy was software CTO of Ambric (semiconductor manufacturer of a teraops chip for highly compute-intensive parallel applications), founder and CEO of Service Integrity (service-oriented architecture and web services monitoring), founder and COO of GeoTrust (internet security), CEO of Novasoft (secure content management), and cofounder of WebSpective (web site load-balancing and quality of service). WebSpective and GeoTrust were two companies Jothy founded that had exits greater than $100M. Jothy also held various executive positions at Borland International, including vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Tools Division, which was responsible for the Borland C++, Delphi, and JBuilder development tools.
Jothy is the author of two successful technical books: How Debuggers Work (Wiley, 1996) and Securing Web Services with WS-Security (Sams, 2004). He also holds several patents.
Throughout his career, Jothy has been involved with each computing architectural disruption (distributed computing, the internet, client-server, web services, and now the cloud) from their earliest glimmer to when they become mainstream. In many cases, he has built new companies to help make other companies’ navigation through the disruption smoother. Jothy also recently published a memoir titled Who Says I Can’t (Bascom Hill, 2010) and participates annually in athletic endeavors that have raised over $115,000 to date for charitable causes.
ARTHUR MATEOS began his career as an experimental nuclear physicist, specializing in the use of high-performance computing in the analysis of the prodigiously generated multi-terabyte data sets that are the result of colliding particles together violently at speeds close to the speed of light. Impatient at the pace of progress in high energy physics, he left that world to become a technology entrepreneur.
At WebSpective and Inktomi, he was the product manager for the web application management and content distribution product lines. Arthur was an early pioneer of the CDN space and has a patent awarded on content distribution technology. He founded Service Integrity, a company focused on web services management and providing realtime business intelligence for SOA.
Most recently, Arthur was the VP and general manager of emerging technologies at Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware. Arthur championed and led the development of a suite of innovative new SaaS offerings focused on the predeployment lifecycle management off web applications. The flagship offering, Reality Load, employs multiple clouds, including Gomez’s own distributed worldwide cloud of over 100,000 geographically distributed measurement agents as well as those from multiple commercial cloud providers such as EC2 and GoGrid to produce the most realistic load tests possible for Internet facing applications.
Arthur holds an A.B. in physics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from MIT.
ANNE THOMAS MANES is vice president and research director with the Burton Group Research division of Gartner, Inc., an IT research and advisory group. (See www.burtongroup.com.) She leads research on application development and delivery strategies, with a specific focus on service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing.
Anne is a widely recognized industry expert on application architecture and SOA. She is notorious for her controversial weblog post “SOA Is Dead; Long Live Services.” She is one of the authors of the SOA Manifesto (www.soa-manifesto.org), the author of a forthcoming book on SOA Governance (http://soabooks.com/governance), and the author of Web Services: A Manager’s Guide (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003)). She is a frequent speaker at trade shows and author of numerous articles.
The figure on the cover of The Cloud at Your Service is captioned “Le mercier,” which translates to haberdasher or a retail dealer in men’s furnishings, such as shirts, ties, gloves, socks, and hats. The illustration, which is fi nely drawn and colored by hand, is taken from a 19th-century collection of French dress customs published in France.
The rich variety of this collection reminds us vividly of how culturally apart the world’s towns and regions were just 200 years ago. Isolated from each other, people spoke different dialects and languages. In the streets or in the countryside, it was easy to identify where they lived and what their trade or station in life was just by their dress.
Dress codes have changed since then and the diversity by region, so rich at the time, has faded away. It is now hard to tell apart the inhabitants of different continents, let alone different towns or regions. Perhaps we have traded cultural diversity for a more varied personal life—certainly for a more varied and fast-paced technological life.
At a time when it’s hard to tell one computer book from another, Manning celebrates the inventiveness and initiative of the computer business with book covers based on the rich diversity of regional life of two centuries ago, brought back to life by illustrations such as this one.