Part of my perfessional & personal mission is to kick over mental ant hills. In the cloud space, I believe that people are trying way too hard to define cloud into neat little buckets. That leads me to try and reorient around new visualizations. The purpose of doing this is to strip away historical thought patterns that limit our ability to envision future patterns (meaning: attitude adjustment).
The Cloud Cocktail
The technologies underlying cloud are complex; however, the core components for cloud are simple: applications, networked services and virtualized infrastructure. These three components in varying proportions garnished with management APIs form the basis for all cloud solutions.
This cocktail napkin sketch of a cloud may appear sparse, but it provides the key insights that drive a vision for how to adapt and respond to clouds’ rapid metamorphosis. It would be ideal to point to a single set of technologies and declare that it is a Cloud; unfortunately, cloud is a transformation, not an end-state.
Rob Hirschfeld 