Cloud Computing: A Hands-On Approach

Recent industry surveys expect the cloud computing services market to be in excess of $20 billion and cloud computing jobs to be in excess of 10 million worldwide in 2014 alone. In addition, since a majority of existing information technology (IT) jobs is focused on maintaining legacy in-house systems, the demand for these kinds of jobs is likely to drop rapidly if cloud computing continues to take hold of the industry.

However, there are very few educational options available in the area of cloud computing beyond vendor-specific training by cloud providers themselves. Cloud computing courses have not found their way (yet) into mainstream college curricula.

This book is written as a textbook on cloud computing for educational programs at colleges. It can also be used by cloud service providers who may be interested in offering a broader perspective of cloud computing to accompany their own customer and employee training programs. The typical reader is expected to have completed a couple of courses in programming using traditional high-level languages at the college-level, and is either a senior or a beginning graduate student in one of the science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields. We have tried to write a comprehensive book that transfers knowledge through an immersive "hands-on approach", where the reader is provided the necessary guidance and knowledge to develop working code for real-world cloud applications.

Additional support is available at the book's website: www.cloudcomputingbook.info

Organization
The book is organized into three main parts. Part I covers technologies that form the foundations of cloud computing. These include topics such as virtualization, load balancing, scalability & elasticity, deployment, and replication. Part II introduces the reader to the design & programming aspects of cloud computing. Case studies on design and implementation of several cloud applications in the areas such as image processing, live streaming and social networks analytics are provided. Part III introduces the reader to specialized aspects of cloud computing including cloud application benchmarking, cloud security, multimedia applications and big data analytics. Case studies in areas such as IT, healthcare, transportation, networking and education are provided.