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.