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The cloud's demographics
In trying to navigate through the maze of the several definition's that are available, it is clear that there are various ways in which we can take a look at clouds, however, we will focus on the main ones and simplify them for our understanding.
As a first step, let us define what could pass as cloud computing. The Wikipedia definition is as follows:
"Cloud computing is an (IT) paradigm, a model for enabling ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable resources (such as computer networks, servers, storage, applications and services), which can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet"
If we look at that statement from a technical standpoint, it would be fair to say that in order for something to be referred to as cloud computing, it must at least possess the following characteristics:
- Self-service (reduces wait time to get resources provisioned)
- Shared, standard, consistent (shared pools of configurable resources)
- Cross-domain automation (rapid provisioning)
- Consumption based chargeback and billing
The three main ways in which we can take a look at dissecting the clouds are as follows:
- Based on abstraction
- Based on the services offered
- Based on the consumers of the services
