If you peel back the label and its says “Grid” or “OGSA” underneath… its not a cloud.
If you need to send a 40 page requirements document to the vendor then… it is not cloud.
If you can’t buy it on your personal credit card… it is not a cloud
If they are trying to sell you hardware… its not a cloud.
If there is no API… its not a cloud.
If you need to rearchitect your systems for it… Its not a cloud.
If it takes more than ten minutes to provision… its not a cloud.
If you can’t deprovision in less than ten minutes… its not a cloud.
If you know where the machines are… its not a cloud.
If there is a consultant in the room… its not a cloud.
If you need to specify the number of machines you want upfront… its not a cloud.
If it only runs one operating system… its not a cloud.
If you can’t connect to it from your own machine… its not a cloud.
If you need to install software to use it… its not a cloud.
If you own all the hardware… its not a cloud.
with input from Alexis Richardson, of CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server on Demand, nicely written up here by Phil Wainewright.
image courtesy of Mike9Alive under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
12 Comments
nice cull..
not sure.. if I agree with the “If you know where the machines are… its not a cloud.”
most times the DC is known fact along with fail over locations
If James Governor says its not a cloud… its not a cloud.
Nice list but I too don’t necessarily agree with the “if you know where the machines are” part. In “fog computing” (http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/165) I have argued that some level of visibility into the internals of utility computing is needed.
Someone has stolen all of the apostrophes…
Indeed, brevity is the soul of wit. A great list.
On the “only runs one operating system… its not a cloud” do you mean on the consumer side? . . . since I don’t know where the machines are, I assume I don’t know what they are running? Hmm, maybe I am missing something . . .
James - did you mean to describe utility computing? If so, I think you nailed it. But I think Cloud Computing runs a lot deeper than just that surface perception. I’d be interest in your comments: http://gh-linux.blogspot.com/2008/03/is-cloud-computing-nothing-but-utilty.html
A lot of your entries are dead wrong. I will be creating a counter post on my blog this evening.
Johnmwillis.com
So - who confirms to your list (except maybe Amazon).
All the vendors I know break at least 2-3 rules of yours
so Salesforce.com isn’t a cloud? (It only runs one OS). Nor Google? Nor Microsoft? I think what you’re saying is “it’s not a bunch of x86 servers waiting to be put into use.” And that, to me, isn’t a cloud.
Funny list. Your post (by way of Enterprise 2.0’s blog) got me thinking about the “cloud” as a term being coupled with technology (e.g., “computing”).
My musings are here.
Either a marketeer or an engineer or both are turning in their graves…
Im just a novice but can someone tell me where should I be hosting. Who can give me robust, scalable and sleep at night system. It seems that all I can find is marketing hype. joyent, rackspace, he.net - and the full spectrum of hosting providers but yet they either lack support, technical knowledge or or too much hype.
I believe FlexiScale does fit all the items on this list, but *shock horror*, I don’t actualy believe that Amazon does.
“If you need to rearchitect your systems for it… Its not a cloud”.
Nobody can seriously state that they didn’t have to rearchitect their (existing) systems to cope with:
The lack of static ip addresses (finally fixed as of today) & the lack of permenent storage (having to use S3, ever tried running a DB from EC2?).
I had a meeting recently with one EC2 & S3 customer, he told me it took him 3 months to port his existing application to Amazon, we worked out it would take him less than 3 hours to move it to FlexiScale.
Don’t get me wrong, Amazon is doing great things for this industry, just that point doesn’t ring true
Tony.
Hi,
though there are some good points in your list, I can’t totally agree with it. Any of the vendors I know, break one or more of the rules, so who did you have in mind? Even GoogleAppEngine with is touted “Cloud Computing” requires to reengineer Applications not written in Python. So I guess we have to define several classes of clouds. One being more focussed on software providing Cloud-APIs like GAE or force.com and another type offering flexible service and/or server provisioning based on offerings like AWS or Mosso.
Just my 0.02€
Roland
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