The Cloud at Your Service

A couple weeks ago I finished reading “The Cloud at Your Service” by Jothy Rosenberg and Arthur Mateos published by Manning.  The book has about 220 pages.  This is quite small for the Cloud topic.  The book is geared towards managers and decision makers that have little, if any understanding of what the cloud is and the challenges it poses.  After reading the book I would like to add that the book is actually geared for managers that are not savvy on IT or are high-level managers with no former education in Computer Science.

At a high and introductory level, the book provides some good definitions that further open the appetite to pursue more in depth reading on most topics.  Being a system architect, software developer and business owner for over twenty years, and the book did not provide much food for thought.

On several sections, it appears that what is stated on a paragraph might be contradicted on other.  No good rules of thumb are provided.  Perhaps if the book is rewritten to cover better topics in more detail, the book could be useful.

The authors state that predictions, especially in computers and software, have in most (not to say all but the most obvious and simple ones) have proven wrong.  Nevertheless the authors go and make ten predictions.  Some of them might in the future become a reality, but some seem to be quite incredible.  I would suggest for the authors to have followed their own statements and skip predictions.

The book has several pictures and photos that may or may not be what they are touted to be.  Most descriptions of how Google, Facebook and other Cloud vendors operate are based on assumptions.  While reading some of their descriptions about some private data center, the thought occurred to me that I was at a supermarket checkout reading tabloid headlines.  Several sections in the book sounded like a white paper by a vendor trying to convince the reader that if they do not use their product they will never be successful in their business pursuits.

I would not recommend this book.   Hopefully the authors have other good titles which I have not read yet.

The Naïve American