Explore, envision, enable, and execute. This is the mantra in To the Cloud: Cloud powering an enterprise by Pankaj Arora, Raj Biyani, and Salil Dave of Microsoft ( >www.tatamcgrawhill.com ).
For starters who are keen on exploring, the book opens with a concise definition of ‘cloud computing' from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as ‘a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.'
A section on ‘experiments and pilot projects' speaks of the need for enterprises to allow developers to tackle business problems as a way to experiment with using cloud services.
The authors mention, as example, how Netflix used a boot camp-style approach to move its entire website and other services to the cloud. “It isolated software engineers in a space, giving them access to whiteboards, tools, and cloud services, along with the directive to ‘just get it done.' Within two days, the team delivered a working prototype and had already identified tooling issues and bugs to resolve before the new service would be ready for production use.”
Compact guidance for those embarking on the ‘cloud' journey.