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What is Cloud Computing?

The term Cloud Computing is on the rise according to google trends. But what does it all mean? Just like “Web 2.0″ it’s an overloaded phrase with tons of connotations and many attempts at definition. While perusing a cloud blog by James Urquhart, I was inspired to try to define the term myself. So here’s what cloud computing means to me.

• Clouds are vast resource pools with on-demand resource allocation. The degree of on-demandness can vary from phone calls to web forms to actual APIs that directly requisition servers. I tend to consider slow forms of requisitioning to be more like traditional datacenters, and the quicker ones to be more cloudy. A public facing API is a must for true clouds.
• Clouds are virtualized. On demand requisitioning implies the ability to dynamically resize resource allocation or moving customers from one physical server to another transparently. This is all difficult or impossible without virtualization.
• Clouds tend to be priced like utilities (hourly, rather than per-resource), and I think we’ll see this model catching on more and more as computing resources become as cheap and ubiquitous as water, electricity, and gas (well, maybe not gas). However, I think this is a trend, not a requirement. You can certainly have clouds that are priced like pizza, per slice.

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Hi Yan,

Thanks for the quick points on cloud computing. I did a similar trend analysis on the GoGrid blog (a Cloud Infrastructure platform) here: http://blog.gogrid.com/2008/06/10/trending-various-computing-terms-clouds-are-getting-congested/

You are right about the API (ours is coming out very shortly) however, we did things in reverse. Developed an easy to use GUI and then released the API (Amazon did the API and I think the GUI will come soon).

Agree with you about the Virtualization point as well. You can’t do Cloud Computing any other way.

The way I see it (and I will be writing about this soon), there are layers of cloud now: service, application/platform and infrastructure. You just need to choose the right fit. We are at the infrastructure level like Amazon. It looks like Elastic Server is at the application/platform layer.

-Michael
Technology Evangelist for GoGrid

Thanks for your comment Michael. I look forward to checking out the GoGrid API. Elastic Server is a cloud-agnostic platform that aims to let people easily provision virtual servers on demand and ship them as any virtualization format or directly deploy to a variety of clouds.

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>”and I think we’ll see this model catching on more and more as computing resources become as cheap and ubiquitous as water, electricity, and gas (well, maybe not gas).”

I think water, electricity and gas will become very expensive resources in the near future! Let’s hope cloud services will be cheaper ;-)

[...] computing? Opinions differ drastically depending on who you talk to and what their basis is. Yan descibes cloud computing as vast resource pools with on-demand resource allocation. Clouds are virtualized and tend to be [...]