Peter Laird, Architect at Tendril Networks, addressed the Enterprise Cloud Summit to try and provide a taxonomy of cloud computing. He talked first about the difficulties of defining some recent popular terms in computing – Web2.0, mashup, REST. Cloud Computing suffers the same problem – it becomes popular, and people jump on the bandwagon before a strict definition has emerged.
What is Cloud Computing?
Peter collected together some definitions from other cloud computing experts, from the last couple of years.
- Werner Vogels of Amazon, said that cloud computing means “all the resources you want, infinite capacity living outside in the cloud on the internet for you to use”
- Lew Moorman of Rackspace says cloud computing has 3 characteristics: Pooled computing, powered by software, delivered over the web.
- Thorsten von Eicken of Rightscale said that cloud computing means “Outsourced, pay as you go, on demand, somewhere on the internet.
- Joe Weinman of AT&T created an acronym: Common, Location-independent, Online, Utility, on-Demand.
- Geva Perry of Thinking out Cloud, gave a more technical definition “Computing infrastructure and application platforms that are self-healing, SLA-driven, Multi-tenancy, Service-oriented, Virtualized, Linearly Scalable, Data”
Peter observed that taxonomies break down into three types: simple and pragmatic, or academic, or vendor-driven.
Watching 