Books

Cloud computing - A Hands-On Approach is written as a textbook on cloud computing for educational programs at colleges and universities, and also for cloud service providers who may be interested in offering a broader perspective of cloud computing to accompany their own customer and developer training programs.

The typical reader is expected to have completed a couple of courses in programming using traditional high-level languages at the college-level, and is either a senior or a beginning graduate student in one of the science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields. We have tried to write a comprehensive book that transfers knowledge through an immersive "hands on" approach, where the reader is provided the necessary guidance and knowledge to develop working code for real-world cloud applications. Concurrent development of practical applications that accompanies traditional instructional material within the book further enhances the learning process, in our opinion.

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to physical and virtual objects that have unique identities and are connected to the internet to facilitate intelligent applications that make energy, logistics, industrial control, retail, agriculture and many other domains "smarter". Internet of Things is a new revolution of the Internet that is rapidly gathering momentum driven by the advancements in sensor networks, mobile devices, wireless communications, networking and cloud technologies. Experts forecast that by the year 2020 there will be a total of 50 billion devices/things connected to the internet.

This book is written as a textbook on Internet of Things for educational programs at colleges and universities, and also for IoT vendors and service providers who may be interested in offering a broader perspective of Internet of Things to accompany their own customer and developer training programs. The typical reader is expected to have completed a couple of courses in programming using traditional high-level languages at the college-level, and is either a senior or a beginning graduate student in one of the science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields. Like our companion book on Cloud Computing, we have tried to write a comprehensive book that transfers knowledge through an immersive "hands on" approach, where the reader is provided the necessary guidance and knowledge to develop working code for real-world IoT applications.

We are living in the dawn of what has been termed as the "Fourth Industrial Revolution", which is marked through the emergence of "cyber-physical systems" where software interfaces seamlessly over networks with physical systems, such as sensors, smartphones, vehicles, power grids or buildings, to create a new world of Internet of Things (IoT). Data and information are fuel of this new age where powerful analytics algorithms burn this fuel to generate decisions that are expected to create a smarter and more efficient world for all of us to live in. This new area of technology has been defined as Big Data Science and Analytics, and the industrial and academic communities are realizing this as a competitive technology that can generate significant new wealth and opportunity.

Big data is defined as collections of datasets whose volume, velocity or variety is so large that it is difficult to store, manage, process and analyze the data using traditional databases and data processing tools. Big data science and analytics deals with collection, storage, processing and analysis of massive-scale data. Industry surveys, by Gartner and e-Skills, for instance, predict that there will be over 2 million job openings for engineers and scientists trained in the area of data science and analytics alone, and that the job market is in this area is growing at a 150 percent year-over-year growth rate.

We have written this textbook, as part of our expanding "A Hands-On Approach"(TM) series, to meet this need at colleges and universities, and also for big data service providers who may be interested in offering a broader perspective of this emerging field to accompany their customer and developer training programs. The typical reader is expected to have completed a couple of courses in programming using traditional high-level languages at the college-level, and is either a senior or a beginning graduate student in one of the science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields.

In the US, the services sector provides employment to about 100 million, while the manufacturing sector provides employment to about 20 million. These sectors are highly automated, and driven by sophisticated business processes forming an integral part of the digital economy. While the applications themselves may be distributed over the Internet in time and space, the core business, regulatory, and financial aspects of the digital economy are still centralized, with the need for centralized agencies (such as banks, customs authorities, and tax agencies) to authenticate and settle payments and transactions. These centralized services often are manual, difficult to automate, and represent a bottleneck to facilitating a frictionless digital economy. The next revolutionary step in the services and manufacturing economy of the future is the development of automated distributed applications that do not depend on these traditional centralized agencies for controlling, facilitating and settling multi-party transactions that may themselves be subject to complex contractual constraints. The blockchain technology is an integral part of these next steps that promises a smart new world of automation of complex services and manufacturing processes. Blockchain is a distributed and public ledger which maintains records of all the transactions on a blockchain network comprising suppliers of products and services and consumers. With the blockchain's ability to establish trust in a peer-to-peer network through a distributed consensus mechanism rather than relying on a powerful centralized authority, the technology is being seen by the industry experts as one of the greatest innovations since the invention of the Internet. As per Santander, blockchain technologies can reduce annual costs for financial firms by $20b by streamlining processes and improving efficiency. In addition, investment and spending on blockchain technology is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 52% through 2019.

We have written this textbook, as part of our expanding "A Hands-On Approach"™ series, to serve as a textbook for senior-level and graduate-level courses on financial and regulation technologies, business analytics, Internet of Things, and cryptocurrency. This book is also written for use within industries in the FinTech and RegTech space that may be interested in rolling out products and services that utilize this new area of technology. An accompanying website for this book contains additional support for instruction and learning (www.blockchain-book.com).

A recent industry report from Gartner points out that choices related to cloud computing at enterprises have changed from "if" to "how" to build, deploy, consume, manage, secure and integrate cloud services into their operations. The cloud solutions architect is the person who defines the enterprise cloud strategy from a technical point of view and must take responsibility for rolling out these cloud services. Cloud computing is a transformative paradigm that enables scalable, convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing and networking resources, for efficiently delivering applications and services over the Internet. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leading provider of cloud platforms and services, defines a cloud solutions architect as one who can provide solution plans for the best architectural practices for cloud applications, can design and deploy highly scalable and fault-tolerant services, can assist in lifting legacy applications and shifting them to the cloud, and can identify and plan for data entry and exit from the cloud platform, choose suitable cloud services based on data, compute, and security requirements. Further, the cloud solutions architect also ensures that enterprise offerings conform to sound principles, such as AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) for cloud applications and services. We have written this textbook, as part of our expanding "A Hands-On Approach"™ series, to meet this need at colleges and universities. This book is written as a textbook for training the next generation of cloud solutions architects for educational programs at colleges and universities, and also accompanying cloud certification programs where students would be interested in obtaining valuable hands-on skills on actual cloud platforms to further develop their knowledge and competency base. The typical reader is expected to have completed a couple of courses in programming using traditional high-level languages at the college level, and is either a senior or a beginning graduate student in one of the science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields. The reader is provided the necessary guidance and knowledge to develop working code for real-world cloud computing applications. Concurrent development of practical applications that accompanies traditional instructional material within the book further enhances the learning process, in our opinion. The book is organized into twenty chapters that provide in-depth coverage of concepts, technologies, and architectures related to cloud computing environments and cloud applications. Real-world examples of cloud-based services and their characteristics are described. Reference architectures for different classes of cloud applications, including e-Commerce, Banking, Business-to-Business, Retail, and Social Networking in the context of commonly used design methodologies are examined in detail. The reader is also introduced to specialized aspects of cloud computing, including serverless computing, cloud security, and big data analytics. Case studies on the applications of the cloud in industry, healthcare, transportation systems, smart grids and education are provided. Through generous use of hundreds of figures and tested code samples, we have attempted to provide a rigorous "no hype" guide to cloud computing. It is expected that diligent readers of this book can use these exercises to develop their own applications on cloud platforms, such as those from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft's Windows Azure. We adopted an informal approach to describing well-known concepts primarily because these topics are covered well in existing textbooks, and our focus instead is on getting the reader firmly on track to developing robust cloud computing applications as opposed to more theory.

Microservices architecture offers a way to realize complex, cloud-native systems by decomposing functionality into numerous independent services that work together. This reduces overall complexity, allows quicker changes to meet shifting business needs, and enables efficient scaling for performance and reliability. Microservices are especially well-suited for cloud platforms and facilitate reorganization of development and operations (DevOps) methods to suit faster delivery schedules.

However, a gap exists between academic coverage of microservices patterns and actual deployment of microservices-based solutions on real cloud platforms. This textbook bridges the gap by enabling readers to rapidly grasp microservices concepts and then deploy practical microservices applications on real cloud platforms. With hundreds of figures and tested code samples, we offer a rigorous, hype-free guide to developing robust cloud-native apps. The book meets the need for educational programs at colleges and universities to train the next generation of cloud solutions architects and DevOps engineers. It accompanies cloud computing curricula and certification programs where students seek valuable hands-on experience on commercial cloud platforms to complement conceptual knowledge.