The Cloud
The cloud is not simply the latest fashionable term for the Internet. Though the Internet is a necessary foundation for the cloud, the cloud is something more than the Internet. The cloud is where you go to use technology when you need it, for as long as you need it, and not a minute more. You do not install anything on your desktop, and you do not pay for the technology when you are not using it.
The cloud can be both software and infrastructure. It can be an application you access through the Web or a server that you provision exactly when you need it. Whether a service is software or hardware, the following is a simple test to determine whether that service is a cloud service:
If you can walk into any library or Internet cafe and sit down at any computer without preference for operating system or browser and access a service, that service is cloud-based.
I have defined three criteria I use in discussions on whether a particular service is a cloud service:
The service is accessible via a web browser (nonproprietary) or web services API.
Zero capital expenditure is necessary to get started.
You pay only for what you use as you use it.
I don’t expect those three criteria to end the discussion, but they provide a solid basis for discussion and reflect how I view cloud services in this book.
If you don’t like my boiled-down cloud computing definition, James Governor has an excellent blog entry on “15 Ways to Tell It’s Not Cloud Computing,” at http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/03/13/15-ways-to-tell-its-not-cloud-computing ...
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