Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Steve Weisfeldt, Elizabeth White, Pat Romanski, Jeremy Geelan, Mike Benkovich

Related Topics: Cloud Expo, Virtualization

Cloud Expo: Article

The Cloud Computing Ecosphere: Main Companies and Applications Classified

The heart of the cloud is what some people call Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

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.

Three different cloud computing levels

Three different cloud computing levels

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).

Platform as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service

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)


Cloud Applications and Services

Platform as a Service

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.

Infrastructure as a Service

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.

Cloud APIs

Cloud 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.]


More Stories By Markus Klems

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/.

Comments (2) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Most Recent Comments
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.

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?

Cloud Expo Breaking News
According to a 2011 survey by the Independent Oracle User Group, over 50% of Oracle’s customers have deployed or are considering deploying private clouds. Most private clouds today support non-production workloads because enterprises are unable to deploy mission-critical applications in their private cloud. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Sr. Principal Product Director at Oracle, will discuss how the same Oracle technology that powers the Oracle Public Cloud e...
The impact of Big Data is extremely broad for business, information management and technology. Being able to analyze your growing mountain of data can give you a distinct competitive advantage, but Big Data can be more than traditional tools can handle. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Igoe, Executive Director of Cloud and Big Data Solutions at Dell, will discuss how Dell Apache Hadoop Solutions can help by providing super-fast analysis, data mining and processing.
With BigDataExpo 2012 New York (www.BigDataExpo.net), co-located with 10th Cloud Expo, now just three weeks away, what better time to introduce 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 t...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now just three weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
Whether your company is large or small, you are probably exploring Big Data solutions and using cloud services and will need to integrate with other enterprise workloads. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Gwyn Clay, CEO of Stonebranch, will share detailed information about how their customers are already integrating Workload Automation with tools like Hadoop, and running workloads completely in the cloud using a modern enterprise-wide workload automation solution that is 100...
What do the CTOs of the CIA and the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the CIO of the National Reconnaissance Office have in common with the CEOs of Eucalyptus, GoGrid, ActiveState, Appcara, OpSource and Nortonworks, the CTOs of Rackspace, SoftLayer, SOA Software and AppZero, the Founder & General Manager of Dell Boomi, the VP of Big Data & Streams at IBM and the Chief Strategy Officer at Pacific Controls? Answer: all are shortly to present breakout sessions as members of the distinguished Speaker Facul...
As a Platinum Plus Sponsor of Cloud Expo New York, Rackspace Hosting is offering special passes to SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Manage...
The move to cloud-based applications has undeniably delivered tremendous benefits. However, the associated distribution creates various challenges from the quality perspective: End-to-end tests need to pass through multiple dependent systems, which are commonly unavailable, evolving, or difficult-to-access for testing. Accessing such systems often involves transaction and bandwidth fees. Teams need to test and tune the system under test against a realistic and broad range of performance and ...
In this CTO Power Panel at the 10th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, industry-leading CTOs & VPs of Technology will discuss such topics as: Which do you think is the most important cloud computing standard still to tackle? Who should and shouldn’t be using a PaaS product today, and why? Can a public cloud ever be truly secure? How important is open source to cloud computing and Big Data? "Mission-critical apps are now safe in the cloud." Tr...
For many of the same reasons that Software-as-a-Service is catching on with enterprise buyers, delivering web services on top of Infrastructure-as-a-Service architectures is appealing to the SaaS developers. Operational agility, lower CapEx, and a broad array of tools and services are on tap that make both public and private IaaS clouds a great platform to build on. But how do you do this securely, especially in the public cloud where you have no access to the network or hypervisor your servers ...