Spouting Shite

The various level of cloud computing offerings

The guys at Rightscale came up with these really easy ways to define the various level of cloud computing offerings; I have slightly rephrased their explanations:

• Applications in the cloud: In my opinion this is not ‘cloud computing’…it is simply SaaS, Software as a Service, looking to join the ‘cloud’ craze. In this area we will find sites like gmail, yahoo mail, Hotmail, the various search engines, wikipedia, encyclopedia britannica, etc. Basically put, these are services / websites that people can use (either commercially or free) without any concern about where, how, by whom the compute cycles and storage bits are provided.
• Platforms in the cloud: Mosso, Google App Engine, and Force.com have all released services in this area. Developers write their application to a more or less open specification and then upload their code into the cloud where the app is run magically somewhere, typically being able to scale up automagically as usage for the app grows.
• Infrastructure in the cloud: This is where AWS sits. Developers and system administrators obtain general compute, storage, queueing, and other resources and run their applications with the fewest limitations. This is the most powerful type of cloud in that virtually any application and any configuration that is fit for the internet can be mapped to this type of service.

Looking at these different types of clouds it’s pretty clear that they are geared toward different purposes and that they all have a reason for being.

More here:
http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/05/26/define-cloud-computing/