Three Pakistani experts write first-ever book on cloud computing

ISLAMABAD: Three Pakistanis have authored a cloud computing certification book, the first of its kin in the world.
The book titled ‘Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure’ offers help to those IT professionals who want to become cloud administrators.
One of the authors of the book describes cloud computing as ‘services which are hosted on multiple servers for instance Gmail, Google Maps, Yahoo etc’.
The authors are Zafar Gilani, Abdul Salam and Salman-ul-Haq. Zafar Gilani, an IT specialist at GfK, Nuremberg.
He was an Erasmus Mundus scholar at Polytechnic University of Catalonia and Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (KTH), with postgraduate studies focused on distributed computing. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge.
Abdul Salam is a senior consultant with Energy Services, and author of numerous blogs, books, white papers, and tutorials on cloud computing. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, followed by an MBA-IT degree and certifications by Cisco and Juniper Networks. He is a frequent contributor to CloudTweaks.com. Salman-ul-Haq is co-founder and CEO of TunaCode Inc, that delivers GPU-accelerated computing solutions to time-critical application domains. He is a frequent CloudTweaks.com contributor, and holds a degree in computer systems engineering.
Zafar Gilani while talking to The News said that the book is first of its kind in the world as it helps prepare candidates for the CompTIA Cloud+ Certification (CV0-001) cloud computing certification exam. Designed for IT professionals with 2-3 years of networking experience, this certification provides validation of cloud infrastructure knowledge, the author maintained.
It is worth mentioning here that Zafar Gilani along with five other foreign colleagues has won the 9th edition “Best Short Paper Award” of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2013, the largest and most prestigious scientific and educational computing society for the advancement of computing.
The ACM publishes computing journals and has special interest groups (SIGs) and holds conferences (where conference papers are presented and published, Conext being one of them) and offers access to huge digital library to its members. ACM Conext stands for “Conference on emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies”.
It is an international conference held every year for the past 9 years (Santa Barbara, CA in December 2013 was the 9th edition). It is a platform that offers presentations and discussions of novel networking technologies that will shape the future of the Internet. The Conext conferences focus on stimulating exchanges between various international research communities.
The conference acceptance rate is around 18%. The conference also offers two awards: best short paper award and best full paper award. Zafar Gilani along with his five colleagues presented their short paper titled “Is there a case for mobile phone content pre-staging?” in December 2013.
The authors of the papers were Alessandro Finamore, Marco Mellia, Zafar Gilani, Konstantina Papagiannaki, Yan Grunenberger, and Vijay Erramilli.
Their paper has been awarded the best ACM Conext short paper. FOR “A great example of a short paper: a first step that investigates an interesting and timely idea. Although the results are not definitive either way, this just indicates there is more to be done.
Gilani commented that book authored by him and two others has been published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., also referred to as Wiley which is a global publishing company that specializes in academic publishing and markets its products to professionals and consumers, students and instructors in higher education, and researchers and practitioners in scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly fields.