The first comment I have about Barrie Sosinsky’s book, Cloud Computing Bible is that it’s the first one I’ve read that doesn’t appear to have any sucky parts.
This is a plus.
Hybrid Cloud for Dummies was pretty much a waste of time.
Deploying OpenStack was even worse.
Sosinsky’s work, though, is not only less temporally-constrained, but actually provides a huge amount of useful information in a nice, tight package.
Pages 27-28, for example, demonstrate a list he calls, “”The laws of cloudonomics” (drawn from Gigaom). In summary:
- Utility services cost less even though they cost more
- On-demand trumps forecasting
- The peak of the sum is never greater than the sum of the peaks
- Aggregate demand is smoother than individual
- Average unit costs are reduced by distributing fixed costs over more units of output
- Superiority in numbers is the most important factor in the result of a combat (Clausewitz)
- Space-time is a continuum (Einstein/Minkowski)
- Dispersion is the inverse square of latency
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
- An object at rest tends to stay at rest (Newton)
While the book does use individual exemplars (often open-source), Sosinsky took great pains to make as exhaustive a list as could be at the time of publishing – and indicates every time a list is about to be encountered that there are more options that were missed.
A few items in the book are dated (like Google Apps: The Missing Manual was). However, the vast majority of the content is as useful today as it was in 2011 when the book was published. This is an impressive accomplishment for a technical book. Especially for one written in the approximately-nascent world of cloud computing.
This is one of the few tech books I would recommend to anyone interested in the topics of cloud computing. I haven’t bought a copy … yet (my library has a pretty good system). But I want it.