I am helping to build Yahoo! Cloud now. It’s a lot of fun, but its final vision is still shaping up. We’re not in the business of providing IaaS or PaaS yet and as such it’s quite different from my previous gig, Windows Azure Platform. So is Yahoo! Cloud a private cloud? Yes, but with one big caveat – it should scale to hundreds of thousands of servers in Yahoo! datacenters worldwide and provide its tenants scalability, elasticity, replication and many other services typical public cloud offers. For more on Yahoo! vision, please see this keynote from former Cloud Computing SVP Shelton Shugar: Yahoo! Cloud Computing keynote.

On a [very] high level, Yahoo! Cloud vision looks like this:

There are many interesting problems to solve here and there’s a lot we’re going to do, both for existing Yahoo! web properties and for new kinds of applications. These are our customers and more often than not, they are more experienced, more demanding and most importantly LARGER than typical customers of the public clouds. They already have successful global businesses on the web but looking to optimize the use of infrastructure with the cloud and gain new capabilities that otherwise would be very expensive or difficult to get outside of the cloud. And to satisfy them, we need to build not only generic enough architecture for this diverse set of applications to deploy in, but also provide them many of the same capabilities, tools and protocols they got used to within their own established groups, which far exceeds what public clouds have to offer presently. In many ways, it is as challenging as building public cloud and the scale is certainly comparable,- after all, Yahoo! serves 500+ million users every month.

If you want to find out more on Yahoo! Cloud vision, please visit Cloudstock event in San Francisco on December 6, 2010.