Illustrated Handbook of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the development of parallel computing, distributed computing, grid computing and virtualization technologies which define the shape of a new era. Cloud computing is a complete new technology. It is the development of parallel computing, distributed computing grid computing, and is the combination and evolution of Virtualization, Utility computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
The aim of Illustrated Handbook of Cloud Computing is to capture the state-of-the-art in Cloud Computing technologies and applications.

Today, almost any business or major activity uses, or relies in some form, on IT and IT services. These services need to be enabling and appliance-like, and there must be an economy of scale for the total-cost-of-ownership to be better than it would be without cyberinfrastructure. Technology needs to improve enduser productivity and reduce technology-driven overhead. For example, unless IT is the primary business of an organization, less than 20% of its efforts not directly connected to its primary business should have to do with IT overhead, even though 80% of its business might be conducted using electronic means.

Cloud computing can much improve the availability of IT resources and owns many advantages over other computing techniques. Users can use the IT infrastructure with Pay-per-Use-On-Demand mode; this would benefit and save the cost to buy the physical resources that may be vacant.

The Illustrated Handbook of Cloud Computing is well illustrated, includes the concept of cloud architecture and compares cloud computing with grid computing. It also addresses the characteristics and applications of several popular cloud computing platforms. This book aims to pinpoint the challenges and issues of cloud computing, identifying several challenges from the cloud computing adoption perspective and also highlighted the cloud interoperability issue that deserves substantial further research and development.