[mtimjones]

What does this have to do with the "cloud?" Does it really mean "Internet?" The cloud is about scalable resources that can be elastically leased for short or long periods of time. That's different than the Internet, which is a means of communication...

[sp332]

The cloud is the part of the network you don't have to care about. It started out meaning the Internet. You would draw a local network diagram, then a little cloud, then the remote network. You didn't care about who owned all the links in between, where they were, how many there were etc. People have been thinking about moving things "into the cloud" well before it became a buzzword. Moving storage into the cloud was easy enough, just make a network request to send or retrieve data. You don't have to care where the data is, or even who owns the servers. This is more than "the internet" because it includes servers and storage, not just the network. Moving computation to the cloud has been trickier - Amazon EC2 gives you a lot of flexibility but it's not very "cloudy". Wolfram Alpha or Google Drive spreadsheets might be a better example.

[dbarlett]

From The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing [1], there are five essential characteristics of cloud computing:

  * On-demand self service
  * Broad network access
  * Resource pooling
  * Rapid elasticity
  * Measured service

If EC2/AWS doesn't meet that definition, what does?

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145...

[sp332]

I just mean that you have to care a little too much about where the servers are (by region and availability zone) and of course you know who owns them :)

[blhack]

So I take it you haven't talked to a marketing person in the last few years, eh?

I recently was told that a product would be hosted on a local cloud.

What they meant was an NFS share.

[weland]

The Internet sounds like the 1990s, whereas The Cloud sounds like the 2014s.

Sadly, I'm not just being ironic.