This book describes the key concepts, principles and implementation options for creating high-assurance cloud computing solutions. The guide starts with a broad technical overview and basic introduction to cloud computing, looking at the overall architecture of the cloud, client systems, the modern Internet and cloud computing data centers. It then delves into the core challenges of showing how reliability and fault-tolerance can be abstracted, how the resulting questions can be solved, and how the solutions can be leveraged to create a wide range of practical cloud applications. The author¿s style is practical, and the guide should be readily understandable without any special background. Concrete examples are often drawn from real-world settings to illustrate key insights. Appendices show how the most important reliability models can be formalized, describe the API of the Isis2 platform, and offer more than 80 problems at varying levels of difficulty.

Describes the key concepts, principles and implementation options for creating high-assurance cloud computing solutions

Part I: Computing in the Cloud.- The Way of the Cloud.- Client Perspective.- Network Perspective.- The Structure of Cloud Data Centers.- Remote Procedure Calls and the Client/Server Mode.- CORBA: The Common Object Request Broker Architecture.- System Support for Fast Client/Server Communication.- Part II: Reliable Distributed Computing.- How and Why Computer Systems Fail.- Overcoming Failures in a Distributed System.- Dynamic Membership.- Group Communication Systems.- Point to Point and Multi-group Considerations.- The Virtual Synchrony Execution Model.- Consistency in Distributed Systems.- Part III: Applications of Reliability Techniques.- Retrofitting Reliability into Complex Systems.- Software Architectures for Group Communication.- Part IV: Related Technologies.- Security Options for Distributed Settings.- Clock Synchronization and Synchronous Systems.- Transactional Systems.- Peer-to-Peer Systems and Probabilistic Protocols.- Appendix A: Virtually Synchronous Methodology For Building Dynamic Reliable Services.- Appendix B: Isis2API.- Appendix C: Problems.