What books on Windows Azure and development for cloud architectures would you recommend?

Question

I'm looking for some literature on how to approach architecting and developing solutions for the cloud, especially on MS Azure.

Can you recommend any books on these topics?

Answer 1

I think for now, you're stuck with what an Amazon search returns. Azure has only been released a few weeks ago, and most books are either based on the CTP version or not ready to be published yet. Accordingly, reviews of these books are few and far in between.

If you want to get started with development on Azure, I think you're best of with what MS offers you in the form of the Dev center and MSDN. Another good source would be watching PDC sessions (either this year's or last year's, if you can find them. Most of the info from last year is still relevant, with the notable exception of SQL Azure).

But when it comes to books, I think you need to allow some time for them to be thoroughly reviewed, so the best ones can float to the top. Right now, it's just too soon to accurately determine which book is "best".

Answer 2

I agree with Rik. I have read the Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform by Roger Jennings ... but it is out of date so I wouldn't recommend it.

I would highly recommend working your way through the Windows Azure Platform Training Course on Channel9. There are some videos in there as well as hands on labs with some decent code.

I would also recommend setting aside some time and work your way through the list of videos Jim Nakashima put together from the PDC - Videos of the Windows Auzre Sessions at PDC09

Answer 3

i recommend you to read the related papers, you can check the conference pages.Some of the conferences i can suggest:

• CLOUD 2010 IEEE, 2010 3RD CONFERENCE.

• NDSS Symposium 2009 16th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium

• CCS The annual ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference Session Cloud Security

• HotCloud 2010 2nd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing

In these conferences, you will introduce yourself in research area and especially some terms both Microsoft AZURE and other Cloud offerings, don't get lost in details if you are not a research guy.Just pick the related ones to start.

But simply you can start reading with this: Introducing Windows Azure