Preface

Cloud computing has become a ubiquitous buzzword in the software industry. While almost everyone was trying to define what cloud computing actually meant, few people realized that cloud computing is in fact an old idea. The term ''cloud computing'' is an attempt to group a lot of standard technologies under one umbrella and combine all of these little pieces into a unified shared infrastructure. Cloud computing essentially solves the problem of scale—a problem which otherwise seemed too daunting.

As we move towards massively scaled interconnected software systems, chances are that you will develop and deploy the software for the cloud. Cloud computing sounds like the solution to all the problems related to scalability and fault-tolerant software, but in reality, getting cloud infrastructure right is a very difficult task.

Luckily, over the years, technology that supports cloud computing has stabilized and standardized a lot. Many interesting solutions have been proposed and some wonderful tools have been field-tested in the industry. The most important innovation that really changed the way people used shared infrastructure has been Amazon's Elastic Cloud platform. EC2 demonstrated that cloud could serve massively scalable software systems with superb fault tolerance and performance guarantees.

Enterprise software vendors realized that they will have to embrace the cloud model to offer extremely cost-effective and easy-to-manage software delivery. This realization drove major software companies such as Oracle, VMware, Microsoft, and others to focus on making their enterprise software cloud ready.

Oracle Enterprise Manager offers a great environment for building cloud computing platforms for your enterprise. Oracle Enterprise Manager combines various technologies such as Oracle Database, clustering, virtualization, and network to offer a single solution. As we will see in this book, creating a self-service model of cloud provisioning is extremely streamlined with Oracle Enterprise Manager. Oracle Enterprise Manager supports most complex chargeback models and offers great flexibility in designing your own system of chargeback. We will take a detailed look at the various capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager and how we can effectively utilize them.