IBM SmartCloud Essentials by Edwin Schouten - book review
Tags :Book Reviews
I was provided a digital copy of IBM SmartCloud Essentials by Edwin Schouten, Master IT Architect for IBM Global Technology Services, from PacktPub for an online book review.
The book, digitally shows 46 navigation sections covering 112 pages, is a great starter for those attempting to enter into the world of using IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.
Starting with the basics of cloud computing, this guide covers the wide range of cloud components, services, and solutions in the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Following on from this, you’ll be introduced to the public , Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service - IBM SmartCloud Enterprise; before peeking into the future of IBM cloud services. Using this book, you will discover the advantage of both traditional enterprise computing and public cloud computing.
Here is what is included and what I thought about the content. The six chapters cover:
- A history of IBM and the SmartCloud portfolio
- An introduction to IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, estimating costs and understanding the management console
- Getting started with provisioning your first instance then connecting to it
- Advanced usage through API, REST and more. As well as a bit on securing resources
- Images and the catalog
- Futures and links for more information
I will be honest right here at this point. The content was good, basic enough for the new person to get an instance running quickly. However there was one major issue (they can correct this for the ebook version easily). Most of the links in the book were bad. They went to non-existent pages on IBM, a bad YouTube channel link and more. A few worked but I got very frustrated with that. A couple links now even redirect on IBM to some main page making finding the references content impossible. I cannot blame the author for any redirects, but all the non-working links are an issue.
Back to the content of IBM SmartCloud Essentials. I enjoyed how he tried to simplify the drawings of how numerous pieces technically worked. He helped you understand the basics of choosing a plan and dug into persistent versus instance storage. There was one conflict in stated needs for the demo on page 23 for persistent storage to what was allocated later. But you can easily understand the steps, where you are in the process and adjust the number accordingly.
The author covers connecting to both Linux with SSH key creation (this was the primary focus and LAMP was used as the demo) and even Windows. He covered snapshots and other means of making sure your data stayed available even after images are destroyed.. I really liked the pictorial view of the relationships and attributes that was included.
Consider IBM SmartCloud Essentials a primer to get you started in the IBM SmartCloud ecosystem and being able to get your first instance ready. Remember to read the billing terms and more before you dig in!
You can get the book from the following at prices at the time this was written:
Amazon in Kindle form for $14.59
PacktPub direct digital for $20.99
Disclosure: This ebook copy was provided free with no warranty or guarantee of review outcome. Just like all my book reviews that you can browse.
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On Wednesday, February 26th, 2014 by Chris Miller
