Voxeo Talks

No sooner had I pointed here to my article on IVR.tmcnet.com about pushing IVR into the cloud that contains this comment about the term “cloud computing”:

So What Is Cloud Computing, Anyway?
In recent months, it has become hard to escape the term cloud computing. Articles about the cloud are appearing everywhere. Conferences have been formed. Media Web sites have launched new cloud computing blogs and portals. Yet like any new term, the precise definition varies depending upon who you talk to.

than a colleague pointed me over to a discussion on Slashdot, “Multiple Experts Try Defining ‘Cloud Computing’“:

jg21 writes “Even though IBM’s Irving Wladawsky Berger reports a leading analyst as having said recently that ‘There is a clear consensus that there is no real consensus on what cloud computing is,’ here are no fewer than twenty attempts at a definition of the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world — some of them really quite good. From the article: ‘Cloud computing is…the user-friendly version of grid computing.’ (Trevor Doerksen) and ‘Cloud computing really is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. An application or service developer requests access from the cloud rather than a specific endpoint or named resource.’ (Kevin Hartig)”

The links and discussion do make for interesting reading (in the Slashdot-kind-of-way) and point to the fact that the term is still evolving… and probably will for quite some time. I’ll still stand by my definition in my article:

Cloud computing is the ability to run your applications on a providers’ computing platform out in the network cloud.

Basically, you can run your apps on someone else’s system on their network. Rather than having to maintain your own servers, you can push that computing out into someone else’s network and make the system administration their problem. The platform you use can be some massively distributed and massively scalable network — you don’t actually care as long as it works.

In my article, I also go into a bit of my view of how we got to the place we’re at where the whole idea of “cloud computing” makes sense.

How do you define “cloud computing”?

P.S. The Joyent video I pointed to earlier also makes for entertaining viewing on this subject…

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