By: Paul Golding

Paul Golding — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:14:50 +0000

The increased power and abundance of software and hardware solutions means that they are capable of doing more than one discrete task, which causes the edges to blur in terms of definitions. For example, what is an application? Today, a web page could easily be an application whereas yesterday it was just a piece of content delivered by another application. The use of the term service is problematic too, because potentially any producer is a service provider, whether that be at the OS level, the application level, the domain level and so on.
In such discussions of definitions, as you are exploring in here, it pays to define the context – the reason for requiring a definition, the uses of that definition and so on.
I think it is useful to remain clear about the difference between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing, because they do have different commerical and technical meanings at the moment that enable us usefully to delineate the two.
Cloud Computing is a utility service that underpins SaaS. For SaaS, someone has to go build a service, such as CRM or finance management, which they then might choose to deploy using Cloud Computing. SaaS can be on demand.
Hosting in general can be “on demand,” but Cloud Computing scales on-demand – it is elastic, based on consumption (i.e. CPU hours) rather than physical instances. Hence, it scales to the demand, avoiding over or under capacity issues. This is a different concept to services and ecosystems that might be used in an on-demand fashion. For example, I only use WordPress when I need it. I don’t have to worry about running it or supporting it in the meantime – only paying for it (perhaps).

By: simondelliott

simondelliott — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:03:09 +0000

I really like your definition. Its quite good indeed.
I also made a humble attempt to define the cloud in a single sentence
Here is my definition ….
“Any feature that is delivered over the Internet where both the developer and user of the feature is abstracted from the infrastructure that provides it”
and a link to my blog where the rest of the article is here http://www.simondelliott.com/blog/2009/03/what-the-heck-is-cloud-computing/

Comments on: Defining Cloud computing in one sentence ..

By: Paul Golding

By: simondelliott