Cloud Application Architectures

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Book description

If you're involved in planning IT infrastructure as a network or system architect, system administrator, or developer, this book will help you adapt your skills to work with these highly scalable, highly redundant infrastructure services.

While analysts hotly debate the advantages and risks of cloud computing, IT staff and programmers are left to determine whether and how to put their applications into these virtualized services. Cloud Application Architectures provides answers -- and critical guidance -- on issues of cost, availability, performance, scaling, privacy, and security.

With Cloud Application Architectures, you will:

• Understand the differences between traditional deployment and cloud computing
• Determine whether moving existing applications to the cloud makes technical and business sense
• Analyze and compare the long-term costs of cloud services, traditional hosting, and owning dedicated servers
• Learn how to build a transactional web application for the cloud or migrate one to it
• Understand how the cloud helps you better prepare for disaster recovery
• Change your perspective on application scaling

To provide realistic examples of the book's principles in action, the author delves into some of the choices and operations available on Amazon Web Services, and includes high-level summaries of several of the other services available on the market today.

Cloud Application Architectures provides best practices that apply to every available cloud service. Learn how to make the transition to the cloud and prepare your web applications to succeed.

Publisher resources

Table of contents

1. Preface
   1. Audience for This Book
   2. Organization of the Material
   3. Conventions Used in This Book
   4. Using Code Examples
   5. Safari® Books Online
   6. We’d Like Your Feedback!
   7. Acknowledgments
   1. The Cloud
      1. Software
      2. Hardware
         1. The advantages of a cloud infrastructure
         2. Hardware virtualization
         3. Cloud storage
         1. Grid Computing
         2. Transactional Computing
         1. Options for an IT Infrastructure
         2. The Economics
            1. Capital costs
            2. Cost comparison
            3. The bottom line
            1. Platform As a Service Vendor
            2. Infrastructure As a Service
            3. Private Clouds
            4. All of the Above
            1. Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
            2. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
            3. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
            4. Amazon CloudFront
            5. Amazon SimpleDB
            1. Amazon S3
               1. Access to S3
                  1. Web Services
                  2. BitTorrent
                  1. EC2 Concepts
                  2. EC2 Access
                  3. Instance Setup
                  4. Access to an Instance
                  5. Security Groups
                  6. Availability Zones
                  7. Static IP Addresses
                  8. Data Storage in EC2
                     1. EBS volume setup
                     2. Volume management
                     3. Snapshots
                     1. Know Your Software Licenses
                     2. The Shift to a Cloud Cost Model
                        1. How to Approach Cost Comparisons
                        2. A Sample Cloud ROI Analysis
                        3. Where the Cloud Saves Money
                        1. Availability
                           1. How to estimate the availability of your system
                           2. What constitutes availability?
                           3. Cloud service availability
                           4. Amazon Web Services service levels
                           5. Expected availability in the cloud
                           6. Reliability
                           1. Clustering versus independent nodes
                           2. EC2 performance constraints
                           1. Legal, Regulatory, and Standards Implications
                           2. There Is No Perimeter in the Cloud
                           3. The Risk Profile for S3 and Other Cloud Storage Solutions Is Unproven
                           1. Web Application Design
                              1. System State and Protecting Transactions
                                 1. The problem with memory locks
                                 2. Transactional integrity through stored procedures
                                 3. Two alternatives to stored procedures
                                 1. Amazon Machine Image Data Security
                                 2. What Belongs in a Machine Image?
                                 3. A Sample MySQL Machine Image
                                 4. Amazon AMI Philosophies
                                 1. Privacy in the Cloud
                                    1. Managing the credit card encryption
                                    2. Processing a credit card transaction
                                    3. If the e-commerce application is compromised
                                    4. If the credit card processor is compromised
                                    1. Clustering or Replication?
                                       1. Using database clustering in the cloud
                                       2. Using database replication in the cloud
                                       3. Replication for performance
                                       1. How to generate globally unique primary keys
                                       2. Support for globally unique random keys
                                       1. Types of database backups
                                       2. Applying a backup strategy for the cloud
                                       1. Data Security
                                          1. Data Control
                                             1. When the cloud provider goes down
                                             2. When a subpoena compels your cloud provider to turn over your data
                                             3. When your cloud provider fails to adequately protect their network
                                             1. Encrypt your network traffic
                                             2. Encrypt your backups
                                             3. Encrypt your filesystems
                                             1. Firewall Rules
                                             2. Network Intrusion Detection
                                                1. The purpose of a network intrusion detection system
                                                2. Implementing network intrusion detection in the cloud
                                                1. System Hardening
                                                2. Antivirus Protection
                                                3. Host Intrusion Detection
                                                4. Data Segmentation
                                                5. Credential Management
                                                1. Disaster Recovery Planning
                                                   1. The Recovery Point Objective
                                                   2. The Recovery Time Objective
                                                   1. Backup Management
                                                      1. Fixed data strategy
                                                      2. Configuration data strategy
                                                      3. Persistent data strategy (aka database backups)
                                                      4. Backup security
                                                      1. Spanning availability zones
                                                      2. Operating across regions
                                                      1. Monitoring
                                                      2. Load Balancer Recovery
                                                      3. Application Server Recovery
                                                      4. Database Recovery
                                                      1. Capacity Planning
                                                         1. Expected Demand
                                                            1. Determining your expected demand
                                                            2. Analyzing the unexpected
                                                            1. Application architecture and database architecture revisited
                                                            2. Points of scale
                                                            1. A simple thought experiment
                                                            2. How might the outcome have been different?
                                                            1. Tools and Monitoring Systems
                                                               1. The procurement process in the cloud
                                                               2. Managing proactive scaling
                                                               3. Managing reactive scaling
                                                               4. A recommended approach
                                                               1. Amazon EC2 Command-Line Reference
                                                               2. Amazon EC2 Tips
                                                                  1. Filesystem Encryption
                                                                  2. Setting Up RAID for Multiple EBS Volumes
                                                                  1. Types of Clouds
                                                                  2. Cloudcenters in Detail
                                                                     1. Data Centers in the Clouds
                                                                     2. GoGrid Versus Traditional Data Centers
                                                                        1. Horizontal and vertical scaling
                                                                        2. GoGrid deployment architectures
                                                                        1. Side-by-Side Comparison
                                                                        2. Real-Life Usage
                                                                        1. Rackspace’s Cloud Services
                                                                           1. Cloud Servers
                                                                           2. Cloud Files
                                                                           3. Cloud Sites
                                                                           Show and hide more

                                                                           Product information

                                                                           • Title: Cloud Application Architectures
                                                                           • Author(s): George Reese
                                                                           • Release date: April 2009
                                                                           • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
                                                                           • ISBN: 9780596156367

                                                                           You might also like

                                                                           Check it out now on O’Reilly

                                                                           Dive in for free with a 10-day trial of the O’Reilly learning platform—then explore all the other resources our members count on to build skills and solve problems every day.