The ABCs of Cloud Computing

Grazed from the Huffington Post. Author: Steve Hamby.

You can’t engage in a conversation about IT today without hearing having cloud computing dropped in the first two sentences. But behind that term is an overwhelming number of types, issues, solutions, and architectures to consider and digest. The world could benefit from a translation of sorts to explain to the cloud non-experts all this IT mumbo-jumbo. Here’s my attempt.

Multiple Cloud Types

It’s common to envision "the Cloud" as one huge computer network hoarding gobs of information. However, there are many clouds and even different types of clouds, each suitable for different types of problems. Specific features and benefits of cloud types should affect decisions in developing and deploying cloud solutions. And sometimes one cloud type isn’t enough, and multiple cloud types need to be combined to solve a problem. For example, a utility cloud often provides the core computing resources needed for data and storage clouds. Here is a closer look at four of the most common types of clouds that I encounter in enterprises…

Utilizing the Utility Cloud

The utility cloud provisions and manages large networks of virtual machines to provide on-demand computing resources that scale horizontally on standard hardware. Utility clouds are often accessible via Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. This allows nearly anyone, including business users, to provision compute resources to address their IT needs. Examples of utility clouds are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Openstack Compute (and Rackspace Cloud Servers commercial offering), VMWare vCloud Suite, Microsoft System Center, and Apache Cloudstack…

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