Defining Cloud Computing

Posted by Jon Erickson @ 04:40:PM | May 18, 2009

If you've been trying figure out what "cloud computing" is, you're not alone -- and coming to the rescue is the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But as nice as the NIST folks are, they didn't have you in mind when they decided to put together an understandable definition of cloud computing.

Instead, the reason NIST decided to develop a definition is to provide technical guidance within the government and promote industry standards. To that end, computer scientists at NIST, in collaboration with industry and government, are producing a special publication that covers cloud architectures, economics, security, and deployment strategies. They point out, of course, that cloud computing is still evolving, adding that "its definitions, use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks, and benefits will be refined in a spirited debate by the public and private sectors. These definitions, attributes, and characteristics will evolve and change over time."

So what is cloud computing, at least according to NIST?

Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is comprised of five key characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models.

Those five key characteristics are:

  • On-demand self-service.
  • Ubiquitous network access.
  • Location-independent resource pooling.
  • Rapid elasticity.
  • Pay per use.

And the three delivery models?

  • Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS).
  • Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS).
  • Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Cloud software takes full advantage of the cloud paradigm by being service oriented with a focus on statelessness, low coupling, modularity, and semantic interoperability

And finally, the deployment models:

  • Private cloud.
  • Community cloud.
  • Public cloud.
  • Hybrid cloud.

Each deployment model instance has one of two types: internal or external. Internal clouds reside within an organizations network security perimeter and external clouds reside outside the same perimeter.

Details on all of these characteristics and models are available here. Keep in mind that this document is only a draft, which means that if you have any thoughts, suggestions, complaints, or whatever, you can participate in the dialog. Just send email to cloud@nist.gov.

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Real World Parallelism Webinar Series

  • November 17, 2009
    Visual Effects for Animation - presented by DreamWorks Animation
    Speaker: Ron Henderson (Bio)

    Ron Henderson manages the FX Tools group at DreamWorks Animation, where he is responsible for developing physical simulation and procedural modeling tools. These systems have been used for key visual effects in recent films such as Kung Fu Panda and Monsters vs. Aliens (March 2009).

    Prior to joining DreamWorks in 2002 he was a senior scientist at Caltech with a joint appointment to the Applied Math and Aeronautics departments, where he worked on efficient techniques for the direct numerical simulation of fluid turbulence.

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  • December 1, 2009
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    Speaker: Bernard Laberge, Avid, Senior Principal Engineer (Bio)

    Bernard Laberge is a senior principal engineer in the video editors division at Avid. During his seven years with the company he has been actively involved in the replacement of the legacy video processing engines used by Avid editors with a common hardware-abstracted, component-based video processing engine currently running on the CPU with SIMD optimized code, GPU, and dedicated hardware.

    Abstract:
    Learn how to overcome the limitations of a thread-based scheduler, including dealing with the absence of recursive parallelism support and the inefficient handling of unbalanced processing load. Bernard Laberge addresses how Avid resolved the expensive refactoring of their thread-based scheduler into a task-based solution by choosing Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBBs). He explores how Avid was able to easily integrate the Intel TBBs into their video editor applications and more than 5 million lines of code.

  • December 15, 2009
    How to Use Intel® Parallel Studio to Streamline Code Development in a Multicore Environment
    Speaker: Matt Dunbar, Director for Performance Technology, SIMULIA (Bio)

    Matt Dunbar is the director for performance technology at SIMULIA. Since joining the company in 1993, he has worked on parallelization of the Abaqus suite of products, initially for shared memory architectures and more recently for distributed memory architectures. Dunbar has also been intimately involved in selecting both the hardware and software tools used in the development of the Abaqus product line.

    Abstract:
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