This book aims to serve as an introductory textbook on cloud computing. The target audience are readers with some technical background or interest who are also interested in the business aspects of cloud computing. Examples are usually based on the Google Cloud Platform, but the principles covered in the book are equally relevant to users of other cloud platforms.

Even though cloud computing in its modern form arguably only started in 2006, when Amazon began to offer public cloud computing resources, it has almost become a default choice for organizations to operate their IT resources. Its wide adoption means that most IT professionals will work with cloud computing in various roles throughout their careers, making a basic understanding of the technology and its effective use an important part of their education.

Rather than focusing on a specific area of cloud computing, this book provides a broad overview of the topic, ranging from technical foundations to cloud architecture, cloud security, multi-cloud systems and the cloud-to-edge continuum. Various features such as review questions and hands-on exercise help readers understand the material covered in depth.

Autorentext

Michael Wufka holds a computer science degree from the University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany, and a PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He also worked as an IT consultant for a large consulting company for four years, mostly on medium to large systems integration projects using Java.

His main research interests moved from agile software development to cloud computing, which is arguably a very agile way to deploy applications. Michael has been named a Google Cloud Faculty Expert and Champion innovator, reflecting his passion for teaching students about and with cloud computing, especially using the Google Cloud Platform.

Massimo Canonico is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Piemonte Orientale (Italy). His research interests lie in different areas, Concerning the Distributed Computing systems, his current research activity is focused on cloud computing with emphasis on performance and energy efficient resource management. He has also worked on fault tolerant scheduling algorithms and efficient overlay-based data transfer techniques on various families of distributed systems (in particular, Grid Computing systems). Since 2020, he has been selected as a member of
the Google Cloud Faculty Expert Group and as AWS Educate Cloud Ambassador by Amazon. Since 2024 he has been selected as Google Developer Expert.

He is the author of more than 50 scientific papers and principal investigator of many research projects related to distributed systems. He is also a lecturer of courses related to cloud computing since 2006.

Inhalt

Foreword.- Acknowledgements.- 1 Fundamentals.- 2. Technical Foundations.- 3 Cloud Computing Platforms.- 4 Types of Cloud Services.- 5 Cloud Architecture.- 6 Cloud Security.- 7 Multi-Cloud Systems.- 8 Cloud Operations.