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Reviewed: May 2016

First a word of caution. Although it’s not clear from the book’s ambiguous title, the patterns in this book relate to solving common hardware problems in setting up data centres for providing cloud services, not software design patterns for programs running in the cloud.

Having said that, the book does cover most of the basics, although some of the material could be argued to fall into the category of the blindingly obvious! As material on patterns should, it documents best practice in solving common problems in cloud data centres. Unfortunately, the technology in this industry is moving very rapidly, while publishing continues to move at the same snail’s pace it did when I was running a bookshop over 30 years ago. This means there are two major omissions – containerisation à la Docker and its ilk, and Software Defined Networking (SDN).

A few years ago I might have recommended this book for those moving toward what was then a very embryonic version of dev-ops, but now the absence of containerisation and SDN material makes it unsuitable for this role.