The Cloud Computing Book

This latest textbook from bestselling author, Douglas E. Comer, is a class-tested book providing a comprehensive introduction to cloud computing. Focusing on concepts and principles, rather than commercial offerings by cloud providers and vendors, The Cloud Computing Book: The Future of Computing Explained gives readers a complete picture of the advantages and growth of cloud computing, cloud infrastructure, virtualization, automation and orchestration, and cloud-native software design.

The book explains real and virtual data center facilities, including computation (e.g., servers, hypervisors, Virtual Machines, and containers), networks (e.g., leaf-spine architecture, VLANs, and VxLAN), and storage mechanisms (e.g., SAN, NAS, and object storage). Chapters on automation and orchestration cover the conceptual organization of systems that automate software deployment and scaling. Chapters on cloud-native software cover parallelism, microservices, MapReduce, controller-based designs, and serverless computing. Although it focuses on concepts and principles, the book uses popular technologies in examples, including Docker containers and Kubernetes. Final chapters explain security in a cloud environment and the use of models to help control the complexity involved in designing software for the cloud.

The text is suitable for a one-semester course for software engineers who want to understand cloud, and for IT managers moving an organization’s computing to the cloud.

Dr. Douglas Comer is a Distinguished Professor at Purdue University, an industry consultant, and internationally-acclaimed author. He served as the inaugural VP of Research at Cisco Systems, and maintains ties with industry. His books are used in industry and academia around the world. Comer is a Fellow of the ACM, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and the recipient of numerous teaching awards. His ability to make complex topics understandable gives his books broad appeal for a wide variety of audiences.