[boyaka]

Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28...

I've been attempting to write a paper on virtualization and other Cloud/datacenter machine managing software. This was one of the first papers I read in my Cloud Computing class, and I actually recently came back to it after becoming lost reading countless papers on more specific cloud research. It really clears up a lot of confusion on terminology regarding different forms of computing services and the challenges in the field. I wish I knew from the start how much more accurate the statements in this paper are compared to a lot of other content out there, and that I could have been warned about how misleading that other content would be due to authors trying to validate their own software creations.

Before I came back to it, I was playing with the thought that the cloud is really just corporatization of computing resources that only leaves the biggest players to survive because of profits, which really vibes with this paper. It really is just computing infrastructure as a utility and the idea is nothing new. There are several other papers out there that make the same points, but I appreciate this one for really nailing the practical terminology without any sort of vagueness. It's not surprising that it is such a highly referenced and popular paper.