With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...| By Markus Klems | Article Rating: |
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| July 31, 2008 10:00 PM EDT | Reads: |
13,187 |
Markus Klems' Blog
In an attempt to better
understand the nature of cloud computing I tried to draw a
classification of some companies and applications that spawn in the
cloud.
Infrastructure
The heart of the cloud is what some people call Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This is as near to bare metal as we can get: pure storage and compute capacity. With virtualization techniques it is packaged into small units that are delivered like water or electricity (notion of utility computing).
Platforms
The next layer is Platform as a Service (PaaS). Here we find more complex platforms, such as Google App Engine or Salesforce.com AppExchange. Marc Andreessen, who coined the phrase “Web as Platform”, once wrote: “[a] platform is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate. [...] If you can program it, then it’s a platform. If you can’t, then it’s not.” (Source)
Although I would not consider Amazon EC2 or S3 to be a platform but rather IaaS, the elastic infrastructure provided by Amazon has enabled third-party developers to build platforms on top of it. I asked myself where in my diagram to put the other Amazon Web services (FPS, DevPay, etc.) but haven’t come up with a plausible place, yet. It should probably be somewhere between IaaS and PaaS.
Apps & Services
The outer layer of my onion is formed by all the applications and services that are built on top of either IaaS or PaaS. I am not satisfied with the outer layer. I feel that it needs further categorization, such as grouping by types of applications, e.g. Social Network Apps, Backup Services, and so on.
Cloud Applications and Services
API
Each layer has a different set of APIs. Near to the core, developers have standard Web technologies and protocols to access and use the cloud. Further away from the core, levels of abstraction are added, making APIs more vendor-specific. On the application & service layer, we find a mix of standardized and less standardized APIs.
Suggestions?
I want to improve and extend my
diagrams and find a more proper categorization of cloud vendors and
services that sit on top of the cloud. What are your ideas and comments
on this one? And another thing is: Would you consider firms that use
IaaS, like Mosso and cohesiveFT, as PaaS vendors? How are they
different from, say Joyent or FlexiScale?
[This analysis appeared originally here and is republished in full by the kind permission of the author.]
Published July 31, 2008 Reads 13,187
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
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Markus Klems is a research assistant at Germany-based FZI Research Center for Information Technology. His main areas of interests are cloud computing, grids, distributed programming and agile Web development - the technological point of view as well as business models. He blogs at http://markusklems.wordpress.com/.
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InfoPoint 07/15/08 01:35:21 PM EDT | |||
According to Gartner, cloud computing is not just a buzzword; it does have a distinct meaning separate from SaaS. Here is the link: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=640707. |
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Brandon Grant 07/15/08 01:15:29 PM EDT | |||
Is Cloud Computing really just SaaS by another name; what's the distinction? Where, if anywhere, does Service Oriented Architecture fit in? |
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"Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it," said National Reconaissance Office (NRO) Chief Information Officer Jill T. Singer Tuesday, as it was announced that she was one of 10 winners of the 2012 CloudNOW "Top Ten Women in Cloud" Awards.
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In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
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In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
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