By examining the types of companies and technologies claimed to be “cloud computing” (by themselves, or others), and then showing that what they are providing has been around for many years and already has its own label, we can hopefully narrow down what exactly is the important bit about cloud computing.

So…what cloud computing is NOT…

• Gmail, google docs, salesforce.com, and etc. These things are simply web-based services, or SaaS, or even PaaS if you want to get fancy. This type of technology has been around and evolving at least for a decade. It may be getting popular and significant now, but it doesn’t warrant a new jargon term.
• Running your software distributed among many computers. This is called grid computing, parallel computing, and so on. It’s been around in one form or another for decades, and again, does not warrant a new jargon term.
• From the WSJ article: “In it’s broadest sense, cloud computing describes [...] Information is stored and processed on computers somewhere else — “in the clouds” — and brought back to your screen.”. No, that’s called the Internet. See also client/server, server side processing, thin clients, take your pick.
• “A company’s backroom mass of servers and switches is cloudlike.” – No, that’s a datacenter. There’s nothing significantly more cloudlike about it today than there was ten years ago.
• Just a marketing term. Cloud computing is a significant change in how businesses acquire and pay for computing resources.

See more: Storing your stuff online is not cloud computing, What is Cloud Computing?

Shameless plug: Elastic Server will have you running in the cloud in minutes.

Amazon announced today that it was exiting beta and offering a 99.95% SLA within a region. Hopefully this is going to put some cloud naysayers to rest, at least on the reliability front. Amazon is offering accountability in the form of service credits if it violates the SLA. Now this may not be enough for some of you with mission critical applications, but my guess is that most people out there are going to be just fine with it, considering the cost savings that on demand cloud infrastructure provides. Oh yeah, they’re going to be offering Windows servers too. This should make some dot-net-heads pretty happy.

There are already hundreds (thousands?) of companies taking advantage of Amazon EC2 computing resources, and those that aren’t are going to catch up real quick, especially as they realize how much money they are wasting on static server resources that are mostly sitting around idling. You just can’t afford that, not in this economy. Companies are going to wise up and start cutting costs on non critical infrastructure and pushing it into the cloud. And as they gain trust for the cloud, pieces of critical infrastructure are going to follow.

Rackspace building weapons of mass destruction

Rackspace just acquired Slicehost and JungleDisk in what appears to be an effort to shore up its arms race against Amazon. They are still pretty far behind true cloud infrastructure (by this I mean on-demand api-driven resource allocation) but maybe Slicehost can make this happen for them. I’ve been a loyal Slicehost customer for close to two years now, and they’ve declined to accept uploaded virtual images thus far, but maybe that will change. See below for why Slicehost isn’t really a cloud, yet.

Your VPS ain’t a Cloud

Many ‘cloud’ vendors are still just rebranded VPSs. We’ve had virtualized infrastructure in hosting companies for years. What makes a true cloud like Amazon EC2 is that it only takes a credit card and a minute to get computing resources. The other key is that manual tweaking and hand provisioning are going the way of the dinosaur. You need to be able to get a new server up and running with your latest environment and software in minutes, not hours, days, or weeks.

Hosting solutions that require you to first acquire resources by booting up an image and then installing your software are going to be left in the dust. Amazon lets you upload a virtual image you create, which means you can mange your own image catalog, and if you’re using something like Elastic Server then you can dynamically provision your servers from recipe templates that ensure the quick reproducibility of your stack to any virtual format, whether it’s in your datacenter, or up in the cloud.

In 2009 we’re going to start to see companies moving to virtual and cloud infrastructure and dynamic provisioning to cut costs and gain agility. It’s going to be an interesting year.

• Clouds are vast resource pools with on-demand resource allocation. The degree of on-demandness can vary from phone calls to web forms to actual APIs that directly requisition servers. I tend to consider slow forms of requisitioning to be more like traditional datacenters, and the quicker ones to be more cloudy. A public facing API is a must for true clouds.
• Clouds are virtualized. On demand requisitioning implies the ability to dynamically resize resource allocation or moving customers from one physical server to another transparently. This is all difficult or impossible without virtualization.
• Clouds tend to be priced like utilities (hourly, rather than per-resource), and I think we’ll see this model catching on more and more as computing resources become as cheap and ubiquitous as water, electricity, and gas (well, maybe not gas). However, I think this is a trend, not a requirement. You can certainly have clouds that are priced like pizza, per slice.

[shameless plug] check out Elastic Server On-Demand.

…you can attain true server agility because you are doing “Zero to Virtual”; building from component libraries straight to virtual servers in any VM format, with no initial physical footprint. The big win here is you are able to do “lean” provisioning. You use a small footprint OS (one you have configured, or Red Hat AOS, or Ubuntu JEOS, or one of the small footprint OS’s for use in virtualized servers) as the base of the server. This means smaller surface area of attack vulnerabilities, streamlined administration, no over-provisioning of then unused commercial licenses, and more virtual servers per physical hardware. A knock-on effect of these lean machines is greater mobility, more easily allowing leverage of utility or cloud infrastructures.

[Disclaimer: I work for CohesiveFT]

“We at CFT are proud to announce the latest refresh of our Elastic Server On-Demand service.

Elastic Servers(tm) are application stacks which can be dynamically constructed from component libraries and delivered in many virtualization-ready formats (VMware, Xen, Parallels). We call them “elastic” because it is just the amount of components you want for a task, no more no less. Fat stacks, skinny stacks, your call.”

via elastic server blog

This release brings a new UI, a Rails parts bin where you can build your own elastic Rails server, and EC2 support so you can launch it right in the cloud! It’s still in private beta, but contact me if you want to check it out!