Review: Cloud Application Architectures

This is a review of the book “Cloud Application Architectures” by George Reese

At about 200 pages, this book packs a lot of solid recommendations on deploying and managing an application within the cloud. The book has an admitted AWS slant, however the author covers two other providers, GoGrid and Rackspace in the appendix. That said, the book does not treat the cloud computing topic with low-level command references or specific examples using AWS; you will not find those here (except a handy AWS command reference in the appendix), however this book covers the higher level application architectural issues within an AWS framework. The book does this nicely as the author covers many issues that face architects who need to deploy to the cloud, from both the technical and business consideration perspectives. This includes such things as application design issues, machine images, performance and disaster recovery, but also security, regulatory compliance and cost issues from the business side of things.

The author gives good coverage to the various issues you will need to keep in mind when it comes to using cloud services, specifically backup strategies, security, strategies, database performance and capacity planning. However when reading this book, one cannot help but to think… “How are these issues that much different than a non-cloud deployment? Why are they more important in the cloud than outside of it?” Well, the answer is that they are not, they apply to both worlds. When it comes to application design, database strategies, backups, security and capacity planning, all of these details and strategies laid out in this book are great advice for operating outside of the cloud as well. But what you will find in this book are some of those AWS nuances that the author has encountered which are very important to be aware of and will vary the ways you approach different problems when using such a service.

That said, I really recommend this book for any architect who wants to learn more about some of the issues you will face when deploying in the cloud, as well as simply a great book on general architectural and business issues that any application will face; whether it is deployed within or outside of a cloud service.

Recommended: Yes
Skill Level: Intermediate to advanced system architects, CTOs etc.

Review: Programming Amazon Web Services

Review of the book “Programming Amazon Web Services” by James Murty

So I bought this book out of curiosity and the desire to start poking around with EC2. So I sat down over a weekend and plowed through most of this thing with my laptop and brand new AWS account. This is a good book, however I don’t recommend this book for newcomers to the world of programming, network and infrastructure management as this book requires a solid baseline of knowledge in all areas in order to get through the book. In short, this book is for an experienced technical audience.

That said, this book covers (with detailed examples) about everything you will want to do with AWS. Its all here. S3: Simple Storage Service, EC2, SQS: Simple Queue Service, FPS: Flexible Payment Service and SimpleDB. My only issue with the book was that all of the examples are coded in Ruby, which being mainly a Java guy, required more fumbling around than it would have otherwise. The other concern is that this book is likely to become quickly outdated as AWS appears to be a constantly changing and evolving service.

Overall I enjoyed the book, it is filled with details and enabled me to get my first few EC2 instances up and running in no time. Let me tell you; wow is it cool to be able to programatically fire up an Ubuntu server with a few quick keystrokes!

Skill level: Advanced
Recommend: Definitely!