Most cloud books teach one provider's services. Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture does something more lasting: it explains the concepts and mechanisms underneath all of them, in vendor-neutral terms, so you can reason about any platform.
Concepts and models
The book starts with the fundamentals: the roles involved (provider, consumer, broker), the characteristics that make something a cloud (on-demand usage, elasticity, measured usage, resiliency), the delivery models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and the deployment models (public, private, community, hybrid). It also covers the business side: cost metrics, service-level agreements and the risks of moving to the cloud.
Mechanisms
The middle of the book catalogues the building blocks providers use: virtual servers, cloud storage devices, automated scaling listeners, load balancers, pay-per-use monitors, failover systems, hypervisors and resource clusters, along with the management and security mechanisms around them.
Architectures
The final part combines those mechanisms into architectures: workload distribution, dynamic scalability, elastic capacity, service load balancing, resource pooling, redundant storage, and more advanced designs for hypervisor clustering, disaster recovery and zero downtime.
Understand the mechanism, and every provider's console becomes a variation on something you already know.
Key ideas
Vendor-neutral foundations last.
Product names change constantly; the underlying mechanisms and models don't.
Elasticity and measured usage define the cloud.
If capacity can't scale on demand and be billed by use, it isn't really cloud.
Cost is an architecture concern.
Pricing models and usage metrics should shape design decisions from the start.
Resilience is designed in.
Redundancy, failover and disaster recovery are architectural patterns, not settings to switch on later.
My take
The cloud book I'd read before any provider's certification.
I've designed and run systems on both Azure and AWS, and hold architecture certifications on both. The concepts in this book carried across all of it: once you know the mechanisms, each provider's services map onto ideas you already understand.
It's a textbook in style, so it isn't a quick read. But for architects who need to reason about the cloud rather than just use one console, it's one of the best foundations I know.
Who should read it
- Engineers moving into cloud or solution architecture.
- Architects working across more than one cloud provider.
- Anyone preparing for cloud architecture certifications.