Cloud Computing 101 – Defining the Cloud?
Posted by brennels on February 1, 2010
I have been receiving many questions recently regarding what is the cloud so I decided that I would start my own Cloud 101 series to help answer this often confusing question. I was working on an upcoming article and had a few questions of my own regarding cloud computing and decided to do a little research myself. What I discovered was everyone has their own opinion and definition of the cloud depending on what they are trying to sell. The Wikipedia definition of cloud computing is somewhat confusing, but probably more due to it being written by engineers that for the layman. If you have seen any of the IBM television commercials they describe the “Cloud” as “workload optimized service management platform” but what does that mean? Basically, how I explain it to the average person is that it is a “Virtualized Data Center” and that is it in the most simplistic form. Now that data center can be used for many purposes which I will describe in future articles. In the mean time here is a great video that is very effective at explaining cloud computing in under 3 minutes.
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Disaster Roy said
Great simple explination of cloud computing. Looking forward to more.
Joe Onisick said
I like your definition, The key to that definition ‘Virtualized Data Center’ is that the entire infrastructure is virtualized. Server virtualization is just one tool for building a cloud infrastructure.