Everyone else appears to be having a go at defining what 'Cloud Computing' is; is it a thing, is it a movement, is it an illusion, is it new or is it just old concepts rehashed?
Now having worked as an Infrastructure Architect in the past, I am quite happy with drawing clouds to represent 'something where magic' happens; most often it was the network, it was something which was commonly outsourced and certainly when my traffic ended up in the WAN, I didn't really care what happened as long as it came back out again meeting all my SLAs.
SLAs covered things such as performance, availability, security etc; so extending this idea to the actual compute and storage is not especially scarey. It is certainly going to make drawing diagrams alot easier; no-more incredibly detailed Visio diagrams, just a cloud and a label saying 'Magic Happens'.
So there you go, 'Cloud Computing' is where magic happens to data and it is the death of Visio! And I am sure that is a definition that we can all sign up to!
I want to see a new Visio with the cartoon heads of bloggers floating around the text “magic happens”!
Could we kill off Powerpoint before Visio please? At least Visio can occasionally have some value, whereas Powerpoint is just used to obscure a lack of content or to hide information… Facts live in word or excel, code in vi…
Certainly I’d say that for most of the ‘traditional or large’ IT vendors currently “cloud is where the FUD, hype and BS happens” so perhaps replace that icon with a picture of an outside toilet when talking to those vendors? Not sure if you want different icons for IaaS, PaaS or SaaS as well? 😉
With regards to cloud definitions I’m more aligned with these http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/index.html
Best communication of the fact that ‘cloud’ isn’t always a tangible thing and incorporates many elements is Simon Wardley at http://bit.ly/QNbvK
@Ianhf
Never really thought of it that way before, but the visual of a certain IT vendor, LEGENDARY for their FRAT BOY behavior, sitting around talking about aas all day in front of an outhouse sign, well…
It just gives the subject a completely different perspective.
John
Unfortunately cloud is now responsible for a growth in Powerpoint…with every vendor claiming that their product is cloud ready!
Powerpoint is the sleep-inducing cloud of human communications. Chuck, if you read this – do you write your blog posts in Powerpoint? Some people I know are convinced you do.
It is because PowerPoint is too easy! (good article on it- http://tiny.cc/aA7MH ) — A beginner can learn PowerPoint in less than 30 minutes. These same people get really good at their 30-minute skill set call themselves advanced. But they don’t get beyond those first 30 minutes of skills. And then they go out and present to innocent business people everywhere!
Sean