Cloud computing and software services includes many fruitful topics. In 17 chapters, the authors demonstrate their forte with interesting contributions to different branches of cloud computing. The first four chapters serve as an introduction, whereas the rest of the book covers significant ideas, for example, scientific computing, software fault tolerance in software as a service (SaaS), high-performance computing (HPC), visualization toolkits, bioinformatics, and relational database management systems (RDBMS).

Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the cloud computing landscape and science and software services, respectively. Specifically, chapter 1 discusses the cloud’s main components, SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), with a historical look at the SPI classification model, the USCB-IBM cloud ontology, and Hoff’s cloud model. The salient subjects of chapter 2 include Eucalyptus and NIMBUS for cloud deployment, the RENCI science portal, and an efficient data management system for scientific applications.

Chapter 3 discusses the enterprise knowledge management (EKM) system, including collective intelligence and intelligent enterprise. Enterprise knowledge clouds (EKC) are also discussed.

Chapter 4 reviews IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and introduces the idea of information technology (IT) as a service (ITaaS). Pivotal discussions include the role of automation in IaaS management, the dynamic orchestration of resources in IaaS, creating PaaS software, and establishing developer-friendly SaaS tools. The principles of cloud security, the cloud’s influence on software development and testing, and the impact of the cloud in HPC are also covered.

Chapters 5 and 12 somehow have a common theme: the cloud and parallel computing. Chapter 5 focuses on MapReduce-based technologies for large-scale data processing, and chapter 12 is on enhancing the power of the cloud for parallel applications with complex communication or fast communication requirements. Chapter 5 discusses different features of MapReduce and Hadoop; introduces GridBatch, an extension of MapReduce; and covers MapReduce implementation on a cloud operating system (OS). Chapter 12 includes the three basic MapReduce programming models; a data analysis examining different cloud technologies for parallel applications; and an evaluation of the different platforms. Finally, message-passing infrastructure (MPI) performance for different hardware and virtual machine configurations is discussed.

Reliability is a key phrase in computing. In light of this, chapter 6 discusses reliable cloud computing services, including workload, resource allocation, the availability of services, and so on.

Both chapters 7 and 10 provide visualization abstractions for cloud operations. For visualizing cloud interactions and resource utilization, chapter 7 introduces the Condor software platform. Chapter 10 emphasizes the versatility of the scientific computing domain and proposes a business workflow-like framework for scientific applications. Chapter 8 discusses different computing environments, institutional grids, cloud computing, and volunteer computing.

Chapter 9 is on scalability, access to an “elastic set of resources,” and “resilience to failure” in cloud computing. It introduces the Granules and NaradaBroking environments.

The key idea of chapter 11 is transparent cross-platform access to software services in grid computing. The GridRPC (remote procedure call) application program interface (API), an extension of traditional RPC mechanisms, is introduced as a mediator to facilitate remote access operations.

Chapter 13 is on bioinformatics data analysis using cloud computing. It includes a detailed explanation of the BioVLAB system and descriptions of BioVLAB prototype systems. The environment’s operational layers are included.

Chapters 14 and 15 relate to web services and the cloud. Chapter 14 is on data correlation, integration, and reasoning for multidisciplinary, dispersed heterogeneous data sources using the resource description framework (RDF), and the web ontology language for discovering any probable protein-protein interactions (PPI). Chapter 15 discusses different aspects of the Xbase hybrid system.

Chapter 16 proposes a framework to evaluate quality of service (QoS) in SaaS. Chapter 17 introduces the web services composition (WSC) process for software development.

This well-structured and nicely edited book provides great insight into scientific theories and ideas. It includes a variety of significant results from different branches of computing. Highly recommend to scientists interested in cloud computing’s progress and expansion.

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