Friday, February 3, 2012

Book Review of Frank Munz's Middleware & Cloud Computing




 If you want the lay-of-the-land of the cloud space, then Frank Munz’s sweeping volume is for you. As you would expect from a Ph.D. the expansive yet down-to-earth thesis begins with a definition of terms and builds to a comprehensive synopsis of cloud architecture. As you might expect from Oracle’s Technologist of the year there is a consistent focus on Oracle’s rich middleware technology stack, but does not lose sight of other key technologies such as Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, and of course database technologies. 






This volume is far from being an extended Oracle sales white paper. The majority of the writing covers what cloud is today.
·         It compares Rackspace to Amazon cloud offerings
·         The importance of SOA and how it is implemented in real terms without sales gibberish
·         An extensive coverage of middleware provisioning, domains, filesystems, deployment suggestions, availability and backup and recovery.
This is an architectural document. Don’t expect step by step how-to tutorials. I found it refreshing to see a relatively unbiased presentation coving Amazon’s, Racksapace’s, and Oracle’s technologies all in one volume. Important architectural topics such as capacity planning, system scaling, pricing, and load balancing and more are covered in adequate depth.

It is a book in my toolbox I know I’ll pull out just to see what Frank said on the topic.