The Read Aloud Cloud: An Innocent's Guide to the Tech Inside Forrest Brazeal 9781119677628

What is "the cloud"? Is it here or there? Should it be allowed? Should I even care?

Have you ever imagined the internet as a giant Rube Goldberg machine? Or the fast-evolving cloud computing space as a literal jungle filled with prehistoric beasts? Does a data breach look like a neo-noir nightmare full of turned-up coat collars and rain-soaked alleys? Wouldn't all these vital concepts be easier to understand if they looked as interesting as they are? And wouldn't they be more memorable if we could explain them in rhyme? Whether you're a kid or an adult, the answer is: YES!

The medicine in this spoonful of sugar is a sneaky-informative tour through the past, present and future of cloud computing, from mainframes to serverless and from the Internet of Things to artificial intelligence. Forrest is a professional explainer whose highly-rated conference talks and viral cartoon graphics have been teaching engineers to cloud for years. He knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. But he has plenty of words, too.

Your hotel key, your boarding pass,
The card you swipe to pay for gas,
The smart TV atop the bar,
The entertainment in your car,
Your doorbell, toothbrush, thermostat,
The vacuum that attacked your cat,
They all connect the cloud and you.
Maybe they shouldn't, but they do.

As a graduation gift (call it "Oh the Places You'll Go" for engineering students), a cubicle conversation starter, or just a delightfully nerdy bedtime story for your kids, "The Read-Aloud Cloud" will be the definitive introduction to the technologies that everyone uses and nobody understands. You can even read it silently if you want. But good luck with that.

Forrest Brazeal has worked in the tech industry for more than a decade. He's installed software updates during a live cataract surgery and designed robots that perform machine learning on pizza, all while keeping his trademark sense of humor. In 2015, he began drawing a weekly webcomic about his life in the cloud which now reaches more than one hundred thousand regular readers. Forrest regularly interviews the biggest names in cloud computing through his "Think FaaS" podcast and his "Serverless Superheroes" blog series. An original AWS Serverless Hero, Forrest speaks regularly on business and technology at conferences, universities, and private events around the world.