Cloud Computing Defined

By Craig Balding

From the ESM blog:

IMO, the holy grail cloud has only two primary characteristics and five secondary add-ons.

Primary

  1. It uses commodity-based hardware as its base. Hardware can be replaced at any time and have no effect on the cloud.
  2. It uses commodity-based software containers. For example, an image should be able to be pulled from one cloud provider to any other cloud provider.

Some secondary characteristics are:

  1. Virtualization
  2. Abstraction layer for the hardware, software, and configuration of systems
  3. Pay as you go with no lock-in
  4. Dynamic horizontal and vertical scaling
  5. Flexible migration and restart capabilities

What’s your definition of Cloud Computing?