“The Read Aloud Cloud” Book Review

The Read Aloud Cloud is a new book by Forrest Brazeal who takes a comic book style look at what the Cloud is.

The Cloud has been transformative in many ways. Allowing startups to scale using a fraction of the resources once required and also connecting all our smart or “IoT” devices via some magic that not too many will admit knowing little about.

With that said, the cloud also has its darker sides and many unanswered questions for the uninitiated as a result. Sensing the gaps in understanding for non-techies, Brazeal has put together a high-level look at the main aspects of the cloud which should bring most readers up to speed.

As I mentioned above the book is created in a comic book style with interesting illustrations accompanying the rhyming text throughout. Yes, rhyming!

If not already a difficult enough task to explain what the cloud is, Brazeal took on the extra task of trying to make the text that accompanies each illustration rhyme. I can only imagine he regretted this choice when trying to find sentences that rhyme with terms like “serverless”, “mainframe” and “edge computing”!

For the most part, the rhyming works and you find yourself reading each page in the style of a nursery rhyme in your head which does mean the pages flow by.

Each chapter is opened with two quotes. One being a relevant quote to the chapter content and the other being a funny or interesting quote. The chapters are closed with a “Word to the Nerd” section which fleshes out the main points of the content which are covered in the comic book style pages before it.

A Common Mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools – Douglas Adams (Taken from Chapter 6 “ The Great Cloud Heist”)

The book starts out by beginning to answer the question “What is the Cloud” and from there takes the reader on a brief history lesson to show how we got from mainframes to here and then to how the internet was the enabler for the cloud.

After painting the basic picture of how the cloud works, Brazeal then takes a deeper look into the choices companies make when building their platform on the cloud, what options are available to them and what the pros and cons are from each while regularly referencing the real-world stories which readers may recall to add context.

As you go through the chapters the main job positions associated with the cloud are also covered.

In general, it is a good mix of easy to consume content via the comic pages along with just enough technical detail so as not to lose the intended audience.

The Read Aloud Cloud can be read in under an hour, and it’s easy to see how it could be a convenient tool to share around between a team that let’s say are setting out on a cloud migration or to the non-technical people in a start-up so they can get familiar with the terminology and gain a basic understanding of the main aspects of the cloud.

The book is published by Wiley and is available here now.