In a great review of Newstex vice president of technology Chris Moyer's book, Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects, Jack Vaughan of SearchSOA discusses the misconception that you can throw a bunch of servers on the cloud and then sit back and see what happens. The result is likely to be multiple problems like decreased speeds or a crash.That's just one of the "gotcha" moments that Vaughan highlights from Moyer's Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects. Vaughan writes:

"Cloud providers lead you to believe you can take your existing applications and put them on the cloud with no fuss or muss. It is true, the applications can run; but you may find the performance is not what you expected. The fact is that application integration is one of the more complicated aspects of cloud computing."

In his book, Chris Moyer discusses the principles of successful cloud solutions. He explains that your best strategy is always to design around your possible points of failure wherein failure is viewed as a feature that you plan for just as you plan for and design around any other feature. For example, it's essential to scale out rather than scale up and make sure things run in parallel rather than just using bigger and better servers to band-aid problems related to scaling as they arise. Chris writes, "You must figure out how you can abstract critical computations and transactions so they can run in parallel."Check out the complete article on SearchSOA for all the details, and to learn more about building cloud applications (while avoiding potential problems), follow the link to read about Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects on the Newstex blog.Image: Will Merydith