There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the term “cloud computing” really means.  Someone recently told me that “what goes around, comes around” because they thought that cloud computing was the same as timesharing from the old days of minicomputers and mainframes.  Other folks think that hosting a SaaS application automatically implies cloud computing.  I’m much more in favor of defining it the same way that Amazon Web Services defines it with their cloud computing attributes…

• Abstract Resources – Focus on your needs, not on hardware specs.
• On-demand Provisioning – Get what you need, exactly when you need it.
• Elastic Scale – Cloud is conceptually made of infinite capacity. Scale up and down as needed.
• No Up-front Hardware Investment – Costs are in direct proportion to actual usage.
• Loosely Coupled – Pick and choose the components you need. One does not require others.
• Software Agnostic/Web Services API – Linux, Windows, Database, App Server, Security, etc.
• Utility Consumption and Pricing – Only pay for what you use. Pay by the hour or month. No Contracts.

I recently attended a breakfast featuring a panel of venture capitalists talking about cloud computing, and they mostly agree with this definition as well.  (Although they did also say that they were looking for good ideas to fund no matter what label someone put on it.)

So going back to some of the other mis-definitions, you can see that timesharing really has nothing to do with cloud computing.  Sure, you’re sharing compute power in both cases.  But it’s missing some of the other attributes such as “on-demand provisioning” and “no up-front hardware investment” and “software agnostic/web services API.”  And SaaS applications can be hosted on traditional servers as well as using cloud computing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Cloud Computing . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.