I’m always amazed when I hear everyone’s very different take on cloud computing.  For some there is a profit motive, such as technology providers spinning into the cloud computing space.  For others, such as enterprise IT, it’s the ability to brag about their cloud computing projects.  However, in many cases nothing really changes other than labels.

I’m asserting that cloud computing is not just a way of doing computing, but it’s a way of thinking about computing that’s different from traditional approaches, specifically:  Sharing, trusting, and accounting.

The fundamental tenant of cloud computing is that we share resources, including storage, processing, development tools, etc..  Thus the model is not just virtualization or remote hosting, it’s the ability to manage thousands of tenants simultaneously within the same physical hardware environment.  The obvious benefit to cloud computing is the economy of scale and thus much lower operational costs.

Another important aspect of cloud computing is the ability to trust those who manage your IT assets that are hosted on local or remote cloud computing platforms.  The biggest barrier to cloud computing is not the ability to perform to SLAs, but for enterprises to trust public cloud providers.  Or, to trust those charged with private clouds with the management of those assets.  No trust, no migration, no cloud.

Finally accounting refers to the ability to only pay for resources that you leverage, and also to insure that you’ve been able to meet all performance and uptime expectations.  You’ll now get computing resources that show up like a phone bill, listing the time or the instances you leveraged during a given period.  While many embrace this approach, others find it a bit odd compared to existing practices.  In essence, it’s a more sophisticated return to the timeshare model.