Cloud Computing: Operation Efficiency

The second “TV Show” in Timothy Chou’s Cloud Computing Trilogy.

Once you understand The Coud Computing Fundamentals, the first advantage of cloud computing is to improve operational efficiency. This means reducing cost and improving the quality of service. This cloudbook is designed to go deeper for the producer and consumer of cloud services to understand areas such as availability, security, performance, change management and customer service which are relevant to building or buying.

Cloud Computing Trilogy is a three "cloudbook"TV Show" set, based on Dr. Chou's Stanford class, numerous keynote speeches and several enterprise workshops. Within each chapter, you can watch Timothy give a TED-sized talk, read the text version and see the slide images.

Also consider:

  • Number of Episodes: 8
  • Watch: 2 hrs and 3 mins of combined video
  • Read: 17,676 words in total
  • Tell: 137 pictures from the book you can use to discuss
  • Language: English

Episode Guide

Episode TitleDescription
1. IntroductionIntroductory episode to the Operation Efficiency TV Show.
2. State of the CloudThere are few longitudinal studies of the shift in cloud computing over the past five years. We trace 4 companies (two are around $200M and two over $20B). This talk shows their past and current state.
3. Moving to the CloudA few years ago I was with CIOs trying to figure out a strategy to move to the cloud. Based on the work in the Fundamentals book this chapter discusses how to turn strategy into tactics.
4. Security ManagementSecurity is an increasingly important area. The chapter discusses five major pillars of security and projects important security features. As with all the chapters, this is not designed for the expert, but rather for the generalist who needs to understand quickly the important aspects.
5. Availability ManagementOperating a cloud service 7x24 is a default level of service. This talk focuses on the five major reasons systems fail and discusses the key issues you need to focus on whether buying or building cloud services
6. Change ManagementChange management sits at the core of any cloud service. The chapter discusses five major areas you need to focus on from a product perspective and three areas from a people perspective. While this is mostly focused on producers of cloud services, we end with some key features a buyer should focus on.
7. Performance ManagementSlow applications running on compute & storage cloud services might be worse than outages. This chapter gives you some major areas to investigate from benchmarking to tuning high performance applications.
8. Customer ServiceCustomer service or support has often been thought of as how quickly can I answer the phone. But a cloud service company has the opportunity to redefine this as delivering information personal and relevant to the consumer of the service. If you can do that then you can tear up those SLAs.

"Love the innovative approach to sharing best practices and tangible examples...will be a great asset as we rapidly move to cloud based solutions and business models...very cool book..." - Evren Eryurek, GE Healthcare Software CTO

"These books are an outstanding way for us to bring one of the best lecturers on cloud computing to Africa" - Bruce Krogh, Director, Carnegie Mellon University-Africa

"I completely LOVE the TED-sized delivery. In today's busy world, I don't have time to sort through a bunch of hour+ long YouTube videos to distill a little content.” - Cary Landis, Executive Director of FedPlatform

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