Book Description
The ability of a buzzword to provide the appearance of meaning without really expressing that meaning is a distinguishing quality shared by all buzzwords. This perception of meaning may be conveyed without actually communicating the meaning. A great number of individuals are beginning to see the notion of "cloud computing" as if it were a foreign language. It is used in a broad range of contexts, and it often refers to subjects that do not seem to have any connection whatsoever. During one conversation, they discuss Google Gmail, and then, during the subsequent conversation, they discuss Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (at least the latter has the term "cloud" in its name!). On the other hand, "the cloud" is not a buzzword in the same sense that "the Web" is not a buzzword. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is not a buzzword. Cloud computing is the result of the gradual development of a number of technologies that, when combined, have the potential to transform the manner in which an organization constructs its information technology infrastructure. Cloud computing is the result of the gradual development of these technologies. None of the technologies that go into cloud computing reflect anything fundamentally unique. This is comparable to the condition of the World Wide Web only a little more than a decade ago. In the same way that the majority of the technologies that make up cloud computing have been around for quite some time, the majority of the technologies that built up the World Wide Web have been around for decades before Netscape came along and made them accessible. Cloud computing and the World Wide Web are both examples of this. These were made accessible to the general public for the first time solely due to Amazon.com. When it comes to the deployment of their applications, the purpose of this book is to provide developers of transactional web apps with the knowledge and skills essential to make the most of cloud infrastructure. This book has a stronger emphasis on cloud computing as it relates to Amazon EC2 than it does on cloud computing as it relates to Google Gmail.