In my (and a lot of other people's) mind, what differentiates an IaaS "Cloud Provider" from a simple VPS provider is the presence of an API interface to do operations on storage and compute resources.
So, for example AWS EC2 == Cloud Linode == Cloud Rackspace "Cloud Servers" (formerly the Slicehost tech) == Cloud GoGrid == Cloud Rackspace "Old school service offering, rebranded as Private cloud" == Not a Cloud Ye Ole Hosting provider with a VMWare Cluster marketing their offering as "Private Cloud" == Not a Cloud (unless they expose the vSphere API to you) Your Corporate IT Department's VMWare Cluster, where you have to fill out paperwork and get the blessing of the SAN administrator to provision a VM == Not a Cloud Internal Openstack or Eucalyptus driven internal "self service", API accessible provisioning == Cloud. For a really good example of a cloud programming library, see here: https://github.com/geemus/fog/tree/master/lib/fog/providers /2 cents -s On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Tom Limoncelli <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 3:10 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> just the topic of what "Cloud" means is a substantial presentation on it's >> own. > > Ive stopped using the term cloud except when being generic or ironic. > I use SaaS, IaaS and PaaS so that I say exactly what I mean. > > SaaS: Software as as Service: Salesforce.com, EventBright.com, Google > Apps, etc. > IaaS: Infrastructure as as Service: Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, etc. > PaaS: Platform as a Service: Google App Engine and similar systems. > > Alternatively... > SaaS: It's a web site! > IaaS: It's a VM! > PaaS: It's a framework! > > Tom > P.S. This article gives some good definitions. It isn't that > technical and I can give it to CTOs and executives: > http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/4/81493-a-view-of-cloud-computing/fulltext > > -- > See you in Boston! > Dec 4-9, Boston, Usenix LISA, www.usenix.org/event/lisa11 > Dec 4-5, Boston, ACM CHIMIT, chimit.acm.org > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
