I read this book for the first time in 2015 almost a year later after its publication in 2014 and since then I have consulted it a number of times. In fact I just consulted it again a couple of days ago. Since this book is part of the Wiley CIO Series, chief technology officers, enterprise architects, product managers, key technology decision makers and of course anyone with an interest in the cloud will find this book an extremely valuable resource.
Unlike most of other cloud computing books I read, this one mainly focus on providing the reader with design concepts which are vendor agnostic. It also highlights critical areas of concern that I believe any cloud architect must address, from auditing, to data, security, logging, SLAs, monitoring, disaster recovery, DevOps, and to organizational impacts. The author, Michael Kavis, has written this book with honestly and with proper justice to almost all chapters, but the first time I read it I was more intrigued with Chapter 3: Cloud Computing Worst Practices, Chapter 6: The Key to the Cloud RESTful Services, Chapter 8: Data Considerations in the Cloud, Chapter 9: Security Design in the Cloud and Chapter 14: Leveraging a DevOps Culture to Deliver Software Faster and More Reliably.
After giving success stories about Instagram, Netflix and Obama Campaign in chapter one, chapter three gives a number of cloud computing horror stories and it shows the readers how they can avoid failure when moving to the cloud. There are two points that hit home in this chapter: first, cloud computing initiative shouldn’t be based on what other companies have achieved but rather should be based on business case and second even if a company has a business case for reducing costs in the cloud, it takes more than cloud computing to achieve the cost reduction. “Companies need to design with cost in mind. The cloud can be cost-effective if the architecture effectively optimizes its usage of cloud services. In order to optimize costs, the architecture must monitor the usage of cloud services and track costs”.
In chapter six the author details three reasons on why Representational State Transfer (RESTful) services are a critical component of any cloud solution. RESTful is an architecture style for designing loosely coupled applications over HTTP, that is often used in the development of web services. Cloud Service Providers (CSP) use RESTful to expose their application programming interfaces (APIs) to cloud computing cunsumers. Therefore according to the author the secret to well-architected cloud services is to fully understand and embrace the concepts of RESTful services. I couldn’t agree more with the author here, a great example of this concept in practice is how simply I embedded my tweets into my professional portifolio website here on the right using Twitter API.
Chapter eight analyses characteristics of data and how those characteristics influence cloud computing design decisions. Based on the data reqirements there are two key decision to make; 1. Multitenant or single tenant. 2. Which type of data store to use: SQL, NoSQL, file, and so on.
In chapter nine the book notes that for security to work in the cloud, company should apply three key strategies for managing security in cloud-based applications, namely:
1. Centralization – refers to the practice of consolidating a set of security controls, processes, policies, and services and reducing the number of places where security needs to be managed and implemented.
2. Standardization – Security should be thought of as a core service that can be shared across the enterprise, not a solution for a specific application.
3. Automation – in order to automatically scale as demand increases or decreases, virtual machines and code deployments must be scripted so that no human intervention is required to keep up with demand.
Finally chapter fourteen details the importance of good process to harness agility in cloud computing. “Each cloud service model provides us with an opportunity to get to market faster than ever before. But it takes more than the technology to realize that agility”.
