Daily Archives: May 10, 2010

If I had a dime for every time I found myself defining the “Cloud” I would have collected myself a small fortune. Okay, maybe not a fortune, but somewhere in the area of $70 (after taxes). But if I was required to use an identical definition each time…well, I’d be broke. This is because the Cloud has many different meanings, often depending on who’s asking. It is fairly understood what the ultimate goal of cloud computing is and it looks something like this: providing infrastructure as a service — from somewhere…anywhere…it doesn’t matter where — and delivering it seamlessly, using proven industry standards, across the ether to some (any) end node. Whether it be an application, operating or development environment, or a desktop, the idea is to provide some calculated level of compute capability to the downstream workloads or users who demand it…as they demand it.

Was that clear enough? I’m on month seven here at VMware and have been trying to wrap my mind around cloud computing at a massive scale. I have access to some of the most innovative people and technology in this arena and yet this is the best I can define the Cloud.