Cloud computing. What started more than a decade ago as just a glimmer in the eye of software visionaries such as Oracle (News 
- Alert) CEO Larry Ellison and then Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy has become one of the megatrends in the IT world.
With economies of scale, anywhere access, flexibility and reduced IT management costs, among other benefits, cloud computing has gone from an interesting idea to a compelling computing solution that enterprises of all sizes are increasingly relying upon.
Yet despite the benefits of the cloud, there are still pitfalls that must be overcome. Two key challenges are reliability and availability. A just-released book written by Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) cloud computing reliability engineers Eric Bauer and Randee Adams, “Reliability and Availability of Cloud Computing” (Wiley-IEEE (News - Alert) Press, $79.95), tackles these key cloud issues and outlines the methodologies and requirements to set up a cloud offering that end-users will find as reliable as their old desktop computer.
“End users naturally expect services offered via cloud computing to deliver at least the same reliability and service availability as traditional service implementation models,” the authors wrote in the book’s introduction. “This book analyzes the risks of cloud-based application deployments achieving the same service reliability and availability as traditional deployments.”
Organized into three parts—basics, risk analysis and recommendations—the book takes a holistic approach to cloud service reliability and availability, looking at how to select the most appropriate design for reliability diligence.
Chapters include:
- Analyzing Cloud Reliability and Availability
- Reliability Analysis of Virtualization
- Hardware Reliability, Virtualization, and Service Availability
- Capacity and Elasticity
- Service Orchestration Analysis
- Geographic Distribution, Georedundancy, and Disaster Recovery
- Recommendations for Architecting a Reliable System
- Design and Reliability of Virtualized Applications.
“We consider the service reliability and service availability risks from the fundamental definition of cloud computing,” the authors wrote, “rather than focusing on any particular virtualization hypervisor software or cloud service offering. Thus, the insights of this higher level analysis and the recommendations should apply to all cloud service offerings and applications deployments.”
Virtualization is given particular emphasis
“Use of virtualization technology is a common characteristic of cloud computing that enables cloud service providers to better manage usage of their resource pools by multiple cloud consumers,” noted the authors. It is important to consider “the reliability and availability risks along this evolutionary path to guide enterprises planning the evolution of their application to virtualization and on their full cloud computing enablement over several releases.”
Special features of the book include a rigorous analysis of the reliability and availability risks that are inherent in cloud computing, simple formulas that explain the quantitative aspects of reliability and availability, and thoughtful discussion on the ways in which virtualized applications and cloud deployments differ from traditional system implementations and deployments.
The book is aimed at IS/IT staff in business, academia, government or NGOs who are moving their applications to a cloud-based solution. It also is a useful reference for technical sales professionals, product managers and quality management professionals, along with any engineer looking to broaden his or her expertise.
If you are just getting acquainted with cloud computing or even are well-immersed in many of the challenges and opportunities it presents, this book would be a valuable addition to your library.
Want to learn more about the latest in cloud computing? Then be sure to attend Cloud Communications Expo, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX.
Edited by
Peter Bernstein
