Cloud computing is already a significant force in modern computing, and is drawing particular interest as a way to set up a web-based company quickly while saving money and administrative headaches. There are many competing clouds services, but all of them raise legitimate fears and questions among web site managers and programmers. They hope to cut costs radically by using the cloud, but worry about security, reliability, and the ability to predict load and capacity. This book directly addresses those questions and provides practical planning and strategies. Author George Reese is a pioneer in the area of building transactional web applications, specializing in Amazon's services. Drawing on his experience setting up sites for many clients, he explains the differences between traditional server hosting and using cloud services. He then provides practical guidelines for key decisions and planning required of system administrators, system architects, and application designers, including: hardware, software, and administrative costs; application architecture; creating and cloning machine images; licensing issues and considerations in using open source software; types of storage, reliability, and availability; backups and disaster recovery; performance, scaling, capacity planning, and service Level Agreements (SLAs); security, encryption, and regulatory issues; database clustering and replication; server monitoring; planning the use of both Windows and open-source applications; and examples of procedures using Amazon cloud services, with some coverage of Windows Azure.
