Software Engineering, Project Management, and Effectiveness
“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s tough to talk about clouds until we have a simple, working definition. While ramping for Azure Security guidance, we defined the cloud as follows:
A cloud is a managed infrastructure providing network, compute, and storage capabilities. It has the following 3 key characteristics:
This simple frame helps us identify what is cloud, and what is not.
That’s not the only definition in town though. Here are a few others that I found useful ...
Berkeley Cloud Definition In Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing, U.C. Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory define the cloud as follows:
“Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. ... From a hardware point of view, three aspects are new in Cloud Computing.
In A Break in the Clouds: Towards a Cloud Definition In A Break in the Clouds: Towards a Cloud Definition, Vaquero et al define cloud as follows:
“Clouds are a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources (such as hardware, development platforms and/or services). These resources can be dynamically re-configured to adjust to a variable load (scale), allowing also for an optimum resource utilization. This pool of resources is typically exploited by a pay- per-use model in which guarantees are offered by the Infrastructure Provider by means of customized SLAs.”
What’s your working definition of “cloud” that you’ve found helpful?
Well defined concept. Thanks Meier.