Cloud Computing is not a ‘Thing’ … It’s a way of Doing Things

I like to think that we are beyond ‘defining’ cloud, but what I find in reality is that we still argue over basics. I have conversations in which people still delineate things like “hosting” from “cloud computing” based degrees of single-tenancy. Now I’m a stickler for definitions just like the next pedantic software-religious guy, but when it comes to arguing minutiae about cloud computing, it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. Instead of discussing underlying infrastructure and comparing hypervisors, we’ll look at two well-cited definitions of cloud computing that may help us unify our understanding of the model.

I use the word “model” intentionally there because it’s important to note that cloud computing is not a “thing” or a “product.” It’s a way of doing business. It’s an operations model that is changing the fundamental economics of writing and deploying software applications. It’s not about a strict definition of some underlying service provider architecture or whether multi-tenancy is at the data center edge, the server or the core. It’s about enabling new technology to be tested and fail or succeed in blazing calendar time and being able to support super-fast growth and scale with little planning. Let’s try to keep that in mind as we look at how NIST and Gartner define cloud computing.

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