By Jeff Erlichman, 1105 Government Information Group Custom Media.

To cut through all the Cloud hype, NIST has come up with some terminology that clears up foggy Cloud visions.
Spinning Clouds

Cloud Computing offers the prospect of dramatically increasing your computing power, being able to balance workloads with demand and paying only for the services you use. Here is how a few of the leaders in the Cloud Computing marketplace define Cloud.

NIST
A pay-per-use model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable and reliable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal consumer management effort or service provider interaction.

Gartner
A style of computing where massively scalable, IT-enabled capabilities are provided "as a service" across the Internet to multiple external customers.

IDC
An emerging IT deployment, development and delivery model enabling real time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet.

University of California - Berkeley
Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the Data Centers that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS), so we use that term. The Data Center hardware and software is what we call a Cloud.

Cloud Manifesto
The key characteristics of the cloud are the ability to scale and provision computing power dynamically in a cost efficient way and the ability of the consumer (end user, organization or IT staff) to make the most of that power without having to manage the underlying complexity of the technology. The cloud architecture itself can be private (hosted within an organization’s firewall) or public (hosted on the Internet). 
For many, Cloud Computing seems as if it just appeared out of thin air – the latest IT fad in what seems an endless stream of silver bullet solutions to organize, manage and deliver government IT resources. 

But Cloud Computing has solid roots in the early days of the Internet when computer scientists drew the network as a Cloud and didn’t care where the messages went, because the Cloud hid it from us said Peter Mell, Project Lead for the NIST Cloud Computing team.


Mell told the Cloud Computing Summit audience that the first Cloud appeared around networking (TCP/IP abstraction) and the second Cloud around documents (www data extraction). The emerging Cloud abstracts infrastructure complexities of servers, applications, data, and heterogeneous platforms.

Basic Formations
There are a number of different definitions of Cloud Computing (see sidebar), but they all have five common characteristics including according to Mell: on-demand self-service; ubiquitous network access; location independent resource pooling; rapid elasticity; and pay per use. And some would add a sixth -multi-tenancy.

Mell then told the audience there are three Cloud delivery models; and to be considered “Cloud” they must be deployed on top of Cloud infrastructure that has the key characteristics:
*Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) – use a provider’s applications over a network

* Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) – deploy customer-created applications to a Cloud

* Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – rent processing, storage, network capacity, and other fundamental computing resources

Finally Mell said you can have an internal or external Cloud depending upon which of the four Cloud deployment models you use:
*Private cloud – one that your enterprise owns or leases

*Community cloud – a shared infrastructure for specific community such as health care

*Public cloud – sold to the public, mega-scale infrastructure such as Amazon or Google

*Hybrid cloud – composition of two or more clouds where you might where you can abstract applications or services through a combination of in house infrastructure or reach out to multiple Clouds.

New NIST Cloud Publication
To help you sort out what will work and not work for you, NIST is coming to your aid. You know the government is serious about a technology when NIST gets involved.

Mell said NIST is planning to create a series of NIST Special Publications in 2009 that will focus on what problems does cloud computing solve; what are the technical characteristics of cloud; and most importantly, how can we best leverage cloud computing and obtain security – the 800 pound gorilla that needs to be solved.