Long overdue, we’re pleased to announce the release of the next chapter of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Builder’s Guide.

At the time we released the initial guide (December ‘09), there was very little information out there about building scalable and cost effective infrastructure clouds. In particular, the level of documentation at an architectural level is still quite barren.

Looking back now at the initial doc, it’s clearly grown long in the tooth (we’re working on a new revision!), but in the meantime we put some thought into a specific problem area: the network.

This new technical whitepaper talks at an architectural level about building scalable networking for infrastructure clouds. Infrastructure clouds are complex and challenging engineering problems. Covering the topic in detail would take years and several books. Meanwhile, the best practices and state-of-the-art proceeds apace.

So, that being said, sharing these smaller technical pieces (~30 pages) that can go into some detail while remaining broad seems like a great way to share information and foment discussion.

To that end, we present a follow on to the 2009 IaaS Builder’s Guide that focuses specifically on cloud datacenter networking and network virtualization:

[download id=”10” format=”1”]

Would love to hear your feedback. We’ll be delivering more of these papers towards the end of the year and into 2012 to share more of our learning and experience.

Thanks to our friends at NEC who sponsored the work on this paper, which enabled us to focus time and resources on this effort.