Cloud Application Architectures

Organization of the Material

The first chapter of this book is for a universal audience. It describes what I mean by “the cloud” and why it has value to an organization. I wrote it at such a level that your CFO should be able to read the chapter and understand why the cloud is so useful.

In the second chapter, I take a bit of a diversion and provide a tutorial for the Amazon cloud. The purpose of this book is to provide best practices that are independent of whatever cloud you are using. My experience, however, is mostly with the Amazon cloud, and the Amazon Web Services offerings make up the bulk of the market today. As a result, I thought it was critical to give the reader a way to quickly get started with the Amazon cloud as well as a common ground for discussing terms later in the book.

If you are interested in other clouds, I had help from some friends at Rackspace and GoGrid. Eric “E. J.” Johnson from Rackspace has reviewed the book for issues that might be incompatible with their offering, and Randy Bias from GoGrid has done the same for their cloud infrastructure. Both have provided appendixes that address the specifics of their company offerings.

Chapter 3 prepares you for the cloud. It covers what you need to do and how to analyze the case for the move into the cloud.

Chapters 4 through 7 dive into the details of building web applications for the cloud. Chapter 4 begins the move into the cloud with a look at transactional web application architectures and how they need to change in the cloud. Chapter 5 confronts the security concerns of cloud computing. Chapter 6 shows how the cloud helps you better prepare for disaster recovery and how you can leverage the cloud to drive faster recoveries. Finally, in Chapter 7, we address how the cloud changes perspectives on application scaling—including automated scaling of web applications.