The four tenets of cloud computing

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Thanh Lam.

I develop technical training course content for IBM Lab Services and Training cloud computing curriculum. In the beginning level courses, I assume attendees have no previous background in cloud computing. It helps to talk about simple things that students can memorize and use as the base to learn more complex concepts of cloud computing. I have found the following four concepts helpful to know when thinking about cloud computing:

1. Web based: A key selling point of cloud computing is its ability to provide services in the form of user interfaces for broader user bases. The Internet provides so many tools to present what the cloud has to offer. These offerings are mostly services for the use of the resources in the virtualization environment. Depending on the demands of the users, the web-based interface may be a graphical user interface that can be accessed from a web browser. Other users may prefer to use different application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate directly with resource components or a resource manager. You need to be sure that the user interface or API is available from the cloud service offerings…

2. On demand: Self-services for using the cloud cover many different types of users who have very different demands. For example, not all users expect high availability and high capacity 100 percent of the time. You should be able to request just the services you need for your work. With a variety of demands, the pricing models for using resources from a cloud are also different. You can pay the minimal rate per hour of use and then change that when your work requires more time or resources…

Read more from the source @ http://thoughtsoncloud.com/2014/07/four-tenets-cloud-computing/