Christopher M. Moyer - Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects

Concepts, Patterns, and Projects

Christopher M. Moyer

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Howard, Ken, 1962
Individuals and interactions : an agile guide / Ken Howard,
Barry Rogers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-321-71409-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Teams in the
workplace. 2. Communication. I. Rogers, Barry, 1963- II. Title.
HD66.H695 2011
658.4'022 -- dc22
2011001898

Copyright 2011 Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. For information regarding permissions, write to:

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ISBN-13: 978-0-321-72020-7

ISBN-10: 0-321-72020-2

Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at R.R. Donnelley & Sons, Crawfordsville, Indiana.

First printing April 2011

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Compositor
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To my wonderful wife Lynn, without whom this book would never have been finished.

After a few months working as a developer in a small start-up company migrating existing services to the cloud, I started realizing that there was way too much work to be done just by myself. I started looking around for other developers like myself that could assist me, or replace me if I were to find a better and more exciting opportunity elsewhere. I quickly realized that there are so few people that actually fully comprehend the level of complexity it requires to develop a cloud-based application, and almost all these people were happy with their current companies.

I began to create a series of blog posts about working with cloud-based platforms, still available at http://blog.coredumped.org, but soon realized that I could quite literally spend an entire year writing up everything there is to know. This documentation would be better placed in a reference book than simply scattered throughout several blog posts, so I decided to write this book.

This book isnt designed as a tutorial to be read through from cover to cover. Its not just a guide for how to build an application for the cloud, but also a reference point for when you have specific questions. When your boss hands you a new project and tells you to make it scale, check the patterns discussed in this book to see what fits. When you work on a project and you find a specific problem that you dont know how to handle, pick up this book. If youre trying to start on a new project, and you have a perfect idea, but you dont know how to scale it, pick up this book. If youre trying to modify an existing project to scale in the cloud, pick up this book. If you dont know what kinds of applications you can build with cloud computing, pick up this book.

This book doesnt invent many new patterns but simply shows you the tricks and new techniques that you need to consider while running them in the cloud. Although you can use any patterns discussed in this book in any sort of clustering environment, theyre designed to take full advantage of the services provided by cloud computing.

This book is divided into three parts. Everyone should read , Projects, so that you can see exactly what kinds of applications are best suited for this type of system.

is designed to give you a general concept of how to develop in the cloud. Its designed to be read from start to finish and is broken into different key chapters important to development:

, Fundamentals of Cloud ServicesProvides a basic set of fundamental ideals when working with cloud-based solutions. This is an absolute must read for anyone interested in cloud technologies.

, Making Software a ServiceProvides a basic set of instructions for providing Software as a Service (SaaS). It includes details on why this is a good idea and some basics as to how to properly construct your SaaS.

, Cloud Service ProvidersProvides some specific examples of services offered by different cloud providers.

functions more like a reference manual and provides you with a problem and the pattern that solves that problem:

, Designing an ImageIncludes basic patterns for use in building your basic image that is the basis for the rest of your application.

, Designing an ArchitectureIncludes the patterns used for interacting with external systems, not systems offered by your cloud provider.

, Executing Actions on DataIncludes the patterns used to execute code segments against your data.

, ClusteringIncludes the patterns used within a basic framework designed to take advantage of multiserver deployments.

includes examples of real-world applications of the patterns provided throughout this book. These chapters use the same overall hello world tutorial, but in two different ways:

, A Simple WeblogDetails how to build a simple weblog from scratch, not using any existing frameworks.

, A Weblog Using MarajoDetails how to build a weblog using the Marajo cloud-based Web framework.