Thanks to Erin Moloney (@erine) for a link to this. Technology Review published by MIT has an article about the U.S. government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology creating a standard definition and a Cloud Computing Reference Architecture. In and of itself that’s not much news. However, I did like the definitions of cloud which can be useful to anyone just starting out in the cloud worlds. Here are some of the key terms they define:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the most basic. Customers can buy processing, storage, and network services (typically using a Web-based self-service tool) and then build their own systems on top of this infrastructure.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) is one step up: vendors provide preconfigured computers running operating systems and applications. Amazon is a player here.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) is at the top of the cloud computing stack. Here the cloud providers have created full applications running on server farms that may themselves be geographically distributed. Although Salesforce.com has long been held up as the premier SaaS provider, Facebook, Flickr, eBay, Yahoo Stores, Amazon Marketplace, the backup-storage provider Carbonite, and even the financial assistant Mint.com offer SaaS as well.
- The community cloud, yet another model, is a private cloud that’s shared by several organizations and typically supports a specific requirement.
- A public cloud is a system that’s owned by the cloud provider and made available to the general public. Facebook and Google fall into this category.
- Last is NIST’s hybrid cloud model, in which multiple cloud systems are connected in a way that allows programs and data to be moved easily from one deployment system to another.
I cherry picked a lot of the quotes so go to the entire article for more on the definitions and explanation of key players in each type of cloud.
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