Preface
I hate the term the cloud. I really do. In a surprisingly short period of time, I’ve seen the term twisted out of shape and become a marketing buzzword and applied to every bit of technology one can conjure up. I have no doubt that in a few years, the term the cloud will be relegated to the same giant dustbin for bad technology branding that the likes of SOA and XML-based web services are now relegated to. Underneath all that marketing fluff, though, is the evolution of an interesting trend. Call it the cloud or Something-as-a-Service—it doesn’t matter. The idea that you can harness computing and storage horsepower as a service is powerful and is here to stay.
As a builder of things, I love technology that frees up obstacles and lets me focus on what I want to do: create. The cloud does just that. Whether you’re a startup or a huge Fortune 500 company with private jets, the cloud lets you focus on building things instead of having to worry about procuring hardware or maintaining a storage area network (SAN) somewhere. Someday, we’ll all look back and laugh at the times when trying to run a website with reasonable traffic and storage needs meant waiting a few months for new hardware to show up.
My involvement with this book started in early 2009. Windows Azure had just come on the market and other cloud offerings such as Amazon Web Services and Google’s App Engine had been out for some time. I saw a lot of people trying to grapple with what exactly the cloud was, and try to ...