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PREFACE:

I first met Mike Kavis when he brought our Licensed ZapThink Architect SOA course to his company in Florida several years ago.

 As the vice president of architecture for this firm, Mike hoped to wrangle his group of developers to help them think like architects.

 And while I couldn ’t transform developers into architects in four days, the thrust of the course was to help people think like architects . 

The book you have in your hands now has the same mission. Cloud computing as an approach to IT infrastructure is still emerging, and thus the technical details are still in flux—but the architectural principles of the cloud are now falling into place.

 But only by thinking like an architect will you be able to take advantage of the full power of the cloud. Architects are in a unique position in the IT shop, because they have one foot in the business and the other squarely ensconced in the technology.

 They must understand the nuts and bolts of what works and what doesn ’t without falling victim to the techie tunnel vision that inflicts so many IT people.

 But they must also live and breathe the business: its strategy, its goals, and most importantly, its problems. Architecting the Cloud connects these dots.

 Mike Kavis has intentionally avoided product- or vendor-specifi c details, focusing instead on the challenges that architects, as well as stakeholders in the architecture, should address—in other words, connecting the business problem with the appropriate solution.

 A truism to be sure, but easier said than done in the cloud. The reason that solving business challenges in the cloud is so difficult is because the cloud is not just one thing.

 It is many diverse things: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS service models, public, private, and hybrid deployment models, not to mention diverse value propositions.

 Some organizations seek to save money with the cloud while others want to shift capital to operational expense. 

On top of these benefi ts is elasticity: dealing better with unpredictable demand for IT resources. Never before has architecture mattered so much. 

Building working solutions in the cloud that actually address the business need  depends upon it. With his hands-on experience architecting such cloud solutions, Mike Kavis has the experience and insight to lead the way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my wife, Eleni, and my kids, Yanni and Athena. They have supported me throughout my career and have made way too many sacrifices over the last decade as my journey took me from four years of graduate studies at night, to five years of being a road warrior, and to the six months when I was holed up in my offi ce writing this book.

 I could not have written this book without the guidance, constructive criticism, and encouragement of my friend, mentor, and fellow RESTafarian, Jason Bloomberg, president of ZapThink. 

Thanks for reviewing my chapters and helping me out at times when I was stuck.

 A special thanks goes out to two warriors whom I have taken to battle with me for well over 10 years and who were a major reason we won the AWS Start-Up Challenge in 2010, Greg Rapp and Jack Hickman. 

Without talented, dedicated, and loyal technicians like these two guys, I would never have gained the experience required to write about the cloud. 

Nobody was crazy enough to take point-of-sale (POS) transactions out of grocery stores and into the public cloud back in 2008. We were met with resistance from retailers, POS vendors, investors, peers, and just about everyone. 

Greg and Jack never questioned the strategy and accepted the challenge. Together we changed the retail industry forever, and now cloud-based POS transactions are the future. Thanks, Greg and Jack! And fi nally, thanks to my parents for raising me to be driven to be the best I can be. Mom and Dad, just look at the pictures because you won ’t understand a word of this book.