Cloud Application Architectures by George Reese (O’Reilly 2009) was the first book that I read on my new Nook – I had read a few hundred pages of PDFs prior to purchasing and reading this book and I was looking for a good technical book in ePub format to try. This seemed like it would be an interesting book, and the price was right (I was able to purchase it directly from O’Reilly for $11.99 USD using a coupon code).
The Good: This was a very quick and easy book to read. It brings out many good points that are important to consider as you architect and build applications for ‘the cloud’. The book does not only focus on technical issues, but also reminds readers to consider licensing, legal and business issues as well. The book has a very strong focus on the Amazon cloud and only briefly mentions other providers (with the exception of 2 appendixes; 1 focused on GoGrid, another talking about Rackspace). Even with the focus on the Amazon, overall the information and recommendations in the book are important to keep in mind no matter what platform you are architecting a system for.
The Bad: While a quick review of the table of contents for the book lets you know that it has a strong focus on the Amazon cloud offering, I do not believe that it was explicitly stated in the description. With a general title like ‘Cloud Application Architectures’ I did expect to have a little more well rounded discussion with more information related to other vendors cloud offerings.
Overall I would recommend this book largely for the following reasons: 1) It is a good source to create a checklist of items to to help validate your cloud architecture and to help evaluate possible providers; 2) It provides an introduction to the Amazon cloud offerings (especially S3 and EC2)
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