For those of you that have been sleeping for the past year, Cloud computing is Hot! Amazon more or less lead the way with their cloud computing platforms for the longest time with new comers like GoGrid, Google and Microsoft coming along with their own offerings more recently. The offerings are quite complex, both licensing, capabilities, costs etc. One of the nice things about this book (among others) is it gives detailed discussions in the beginning of several different offerings as well as their licensing models (which do change often so check directly with the companies).
On to the review..
As I mentioned above, The book starts out with a very general discussion of what is cloud computing. Currently, the cloud is a pretty over used word and it’s important to understand what is meant by it. Things like “Application as Service”, “Cloud Storage”, etc. are all important to understand when talking about the cloud.
Following that, the book dives into the details of Azure (and there are a lot of details). It goes into great details (and specifics) on Azure Blob Storage, Azure Queues, Azure Tables, AppFabric (formerly Velocity), Azure Service Bus, and also discusses deployment issues.
I do recommend this book. I believe it will help if you want to get into the cloud using Microsoft’s offerings.
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