This book describes the key concepts, principles and implementation options for creating high-assurance cloud computing solutions. The guide starts with a broad technical overview and basic introduction to cloud computing, looking at the overall architecture of the cloud, client systems, the modern Internet and cloud computing data centers. It then delves into the core challenges of showing how reliability and fault-tolerance can be abstracted, how the resulting questions can be solved, and how the solutions can be leveraged to create a wide range of practical cloud applications. The author's style is practical, and the guide should be readily understandable without any special background. Concrete examples are often drawn from real-world settings to illustrate key insights. Appendices show how the most important reliability models can be formalized, describe the API of the Isis2 platform, and offer more than 80 problems at varying levels of difficulty.

This volume is based on the workshop "Unifying Theory and Practice in Distributed Systems" held in Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany in September 1994.
During the past 20 years, a substantial theoretical and practical base has evolved in the area of distributed computing. However, this work has been done by largely disjoint communities of researchers; this workshop brought together established experts from both worlds. The volume contains 17 full papers refereed and revised after the workshop so that they reflect original research enriched by insights gained through discussions at the workshop. Among the issues treated are paradigms and concepts, fundamental algorithms and principles, fault-tolerance, real-time, system structures, large case aspects and others."