Bestselling Series

To the Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise

Cloud Powering an Enterprise shines. It is a prescriptive guide to the CIOs who are keen on adopting the Cloud. It provides a comprehensive framework for the decision makers to systematically move to the Cloud. Authored by the senior leaders from Microsoft, To The Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise reflects the real-world experience of dealing with internal IT and the challenges of moving to the Cloud. Though all the authors come with strong Microsoft pedigree, this book offers a generic framework to embrace the Cloud running on any technology stack which makes it a credible resource for CIOs.

With less than pages, this is a great read during a short flight.


  • See a Problem?;
  • Book Excerpt: "To The Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise".
  • Book Review - To The Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise.
  • Janakiram MSV!

Each chapter is modular and makes it an easy read to absorb the key points effortlessly. Each chapter focuses on a specific milestone of the Cloud adoption lifecycle. CIOs will easily be able to relate to the terminology and nomenclature used in the book.

Irrespective of the phase that your enterprise may be in the adoption of Cloud, you will find this book as a great reference. The book has 5 chapters with each chapter addressing an important aspect of Cloud Computing.

4 editions of this work

Here is a quick summary of each of these chapters. Chapter 1 — Explore: It defines the key attributes of the Cloud and explains the subtle differences between similar technologies and the Cloud. This vets the appetite of the reader to go to the next chapter to understand the benefits of the Cloud for his organization.

Refine your editions:

Cloud computing is full of tremendous opportunity, but is also riddled with hype and confusion. Business and technology leaders know the cloud is essential, but lack clarity and experience. To the Cloud cuts through the noise and addresses the Why, What, and How of enterprise cloud adoption. The book lays out a four-step framework leveraging the experience and best practices of Microsoft's own IT group. It provides end-to-end business and technology guidance, including how to analyze application portfolios to identify good cloud candidates, choose the right cloud models, consider architecture and security, and understand how shifting operations to the cloud affects budgeting and staffing.

The book is applicable to all cloud platforms and providers, and debunks myths in its clear and concise style e. It takes a balanced approach, addressing concerns and hybrid adoption scenarios alike. To the Cloud is an essential guide for IT professionals seeking to lower total cost of ownership, improve the return on IT investment of existing services, or help the business bring new products to market more quickly.

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — To the Cloud by Pankaj Arora. Cloud Powering an Enterprise by Pankaj Arora ,.

Feel free to ask questions, and I hope these excerpts and the book help you with your cloud computing strategy and deployments. Designed well, however, a service running in the cloud should be more scalable and fault-tolerant, and perform better than an on-premises solution. Virtualization and cloud fabric technologies, as used by cloud providers, make it possible to scale out to a theoretically unlimited capacity. This means that application architecture and the level of automaton, not physical capacity, constrain scalability.

In this section, we introduce several design principles that application engineers and operations personnel need to understand to properly architect a highly scalable and reliable application for the cloud. A properly designed application will not go down just because something happens to a single scale unit. A poorly designed application, in contrast, may experience performance problems, data loss, or an outage when a single component fails. This is why cloud-centric software engineers cultivate a certain level of pessimism.

To the Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise

By thinking of all the worst-case scenarios, they can design applications that are fault tolerant and resilient when something goes wrong. Monolithic software design, in which the presentation layer and functional logic are tightly integrated into one application component, may not scale effectively or handle failure gracefully. Ideally, application functionality will consist of autonomous roles that function regardless of the state of other application components.

To minimize enterprise complexity, developers should also leverage reusable services where possible. We talked about the Microsoft online auction tool earlier. One way to design such an application would be to split it into three components, as each service has a different demand pattern and is relatively asynchronous from the others: At the start of the auction, a lot of image resizing occurs as people upload pictures of items they add to the catalog. Toward the end of the auction, as people try to outbid each other, the bidding engine is in higher demand.

Each component adds scale units as needed based on system load.

To the Cloud Cloud Powering an Enterprise download pdf

If, for example, the image resizer component fails, the entire functionality of the tool is not lost. Pessimism aside, the redundancy and automation built into cloud models make cloud services more reliable, in general. Operating multiple scale units of a single application across these zones can further reduce risk; some providers require this before they will guarantee a higher SLA.