When a new technology emerges, there is a proliferation of books and articles praising the brave new world of multiple possibilities, as found in the hundreds of texts already available that address cloud computing. From a technology standpoint, most of these books are very superficial, trying to present to readers the basic concepts and business value propositions of platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

This is not the case here. Along 74 patterns defined and explored throughout the book, the authors systematize the subject, providing guidance to architects in charge of developing, selecting, or evolving cloud computing environments. Even in the preliminary chapters, the authors present cloud computing fundamentals in an original way through three dimensions: workload behavior (for example, static, periodic, once-in-a-lifetime), service models (for example, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), and deployment types (for example, private, public, hybrid).

From the mid part of the book up to the end, the authors dive in with a succession of technical design patterns for cloud computing, all of them organized in a very thoughtful way. Hypervisor and MapReduce patterns, for example, are addressed under the umbrella of cloud offering patterns, together with 14 other patterns. Half of the book is devoted to effectively designing cloud applications, covering first the basic design principles (chapter 4) and evolving to application management components and composite cloud applications, totaling around 80 percent of the patterns in the book. Throughout, the reader will find important patterns rarely seen in other books (for example, batch processing in cloud environments), as well as common ones (for example, the watchdog pattern for reliability). This is definitely a milestone book for the cloud computing discipline, providing clear and in-depth guidance to a diverse group of stakeholders: information technology (IT) managers, IT developers, and especially IT architects.

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