The appeal of cloud computing is that it offers scalable and elastic computing and storage services. The resources used for these services can be metered and the users can be charged only for the resources they use. Cloud computing is a business reality today as increasing numbers of organizations are adopting this paradigm. Cloud computing is based on many decades of work on parallel and distributed computing systems. This book describes some of the central ideas in this work as it applies to cloud computing. Relatively few books integrate theory with applications and with practical examples from a variety of vendors; this book is an excellent source for the increasing numbers of students interested in the area. The readership includes students taking a distributed systems or distributed computing class. Professional system designers and engineers may find this book useful as a reference to the latest distributed system technologies including clusters, grids, clouds, and the Internet of Things. The book gives a balanced coverage of all of these topics, looking into the future of Internet and IT evolutions.