Evolution – A Window to my mind

McKinsey recently reported that there were at least 22 different cloud definitions in common use.

I believe Cloud Computing is probably the most hyped and misused term in this decade. The cause is mainly because many technology and service providers have hijacked the term and slapped it on their hardware boxes, or software, or services and claimed to be “cloud-enabled” or an “out-of-the-box-cloud” thingy…

In actual fact, Cloud Computing is not a technology revolution. It is not a mixture of server hardware, operating systems, virtualization technologies and application services, but rather a revolution in the way we conduct business and the way that Cloud Computing can allow a business to increase their IT capacity when required, on the fly, and pay for just what is being used.

Allow me to state what we would all agree on, i.e. the traits or characteristics of what would constitute as Cloud Computing services:

1. On-demand self-service or self-provisioning.
2. Physical resources are abstracted and pooled regardless of their location.
3. Ubiquitous network access to the cloud service.
4. Rapid elasticity – increasing or decreasing capacity at will.
5. Pay per use.

And the possible delivery models or types of cloud services:

1. Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – consumers pays for compute / processing capacity, storage or networking capacity and other fundamental computing resources for their use.
2. Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) – consumers pays for a fully configured, virtualized server environment to house, create or run their own applications.
3. Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) – consumers pays for a fully functional application service for their use.

To illustrate a simple example of IaaS, I have created a “big picture” of what I would consider the components for a Cloud IaaS. Take note that depending on whether an organization is a producer or a consumer, they would need to carefully consider their strategies, risks, and challenges before undertaking that role in the Cloud service production / consumption cycle.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Emerging trends, services

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 23:48 and is filed under Cloud Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.