Like you, we live and work in the world of computing and computers, and we track trends and transformations as they occur. We’re old enough to have witnessed mainframes and their “virtualization of time” model. We lived through the transition from minicomputers to the radical new model of client-server computing. With the same awe you had of connecting to the entire world, we witnessed the amazing change brought on by the Web.

We bring that perspective to the current transformation called cloud computing. We’ve seen this movie before and know the danger of over-hyping something to death. (Literally to death—the term artificial intelligence had to be permanently put to rest after it made the cover of Time magazine.) We don’t think this is hype. We see something different going on this time that isn’t being exaggerated out of proportion.

We see an IT transformation that isn’t primarily technology based as the previous ones were. The same servers running the same operating systems supporting the same applications are running in corporate data centers as run in the cloud. Sure, developers have to learn a few new twists, but nothing more than they have to learn on a monthly basis anyway. Instead of technology being the basis of the change, this time it’s mostly about economics and business models. That’s very different, very interesting, and the reason we think this one is bigger than anything we’ve seen before.

We understand both small startups and big corporate IT. Our careers have been involved with both. We’ve lived in startups, and we’ve sold to and worked with large corporate IT groups for many years. As time has gone by, the ability of large IT organizations to change on a dime has diminished. We understand this trepidation about change—especially a change that may directly impact the entire organization under the corporation’s CIO. That is why we wrote this book.

We had to convince Manning to publish a book that wasn’t aimed squarely at programmers. When we told them the book had no source code, that didn’t compute. We held firm, arguing that a huge need exists for a book that tells it like it is for the enterprise IT worker. The cloud will eventually have its greatest effect on the largest of organizations. But they’re precisely the organizations that have the most trouble changing. We wanted to talk directly to you about how undertake this shift, what it will mean to you and your organization, and how to proceed in a sane and reasonable manner.

If you’re in corporate IT, this book is directly written to help you. If you’re in a startup, you’ll find many things in this book useful as well. If you’re a programmer, this may be a good addition to your bookshelf. And even if you’re just curious, you’ll find this book approachable, not too deeply technical, and a thorough introduction to cloud computing.

We hope the book is being published at a time that makes it helpful to the largest number of people. And we hope you find this book helpful and enjoyable as you consider embarking on a journey into the clouds.