The Cloud Computing Book

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to cloud computing that focuses on concepts, rather than commercial services. It gives readers an understanding of the hardware and software that underpin cloud computing as well as the technological and economic motivations behind the move from traditional computing infrastructure to cloud infrastructure.

Twenty years ago, almost no one used cloud computing. Now, almost everyone uses it. When you contact a social network, watch a streaming video, interact with an AI chatbot, perform a Google search, share photos, or use a phone to interact with IoT devices in your residence, you are using the cloud. Many companies now use cloud for all their computing. In this revised second edition, Comer explains real and virtual data center facilities for computation (servers, hypervisors, virtual machines, and containers), communication (leaf-spine networks used in data centers, VLAN and VXLAN), and storage (NAS, SAN, and object storage). Chapters on automation and orchestration cover the conceptual organization of systems that automate software deployment and scaling. Chapters on cloud-native software cover parallelism, microservices, MapReduce, control-based designs, and serverless computing. Final chapters explain security in a cloud environment and the use of models to help control the complexity involved in designing software for the cloud. The concepts and principles apply broadly to all vendors, with popular technologies (including Docker containers and Kubernetes) used to explore practical examples.

The text is suitable for a one-semester course, for software engineers who need to build software for a cloud, and for IT managers wanting to understand how their organization's computing operates in a cloud environment.