Ask HN: What does "the Cloud" mean to you?

(Disclaimer: I work at Salesforce)

We at SFDC hear a lot about offers to businesses of "your own private cloud", which is essentially marketing jargon for something very un-cloud-like: running software locally, on your own servers, while you're completely responsible for the entire operation. It's a grossly disingenuous hijacking of the "cloud" terminology that I've found promotes confusion.

Most of the other responses here would match my own definition of the cloud: software, offered as a service, where all the underpinnings (data center management, software updates, redundancies, reliability) are abstracted away from you. The key is that you only need two things to access a cloud resource:

  A web browser, preferably != IE6
  An internet connection

When I explain the cloud to people who don't read HN, I usually make a comparison to Gmail and MS Office. You access Gmail through your web browser, and there's no local software to download. When Google releases a new feature or a bugfix or a security patch, there's no action required on your end. You're simply up to date the next time you connect.

Contrast that with MS Office, which comes on a CD/DVD, requires a local install process, and needs to be constantly patched for features and security. All of the work to maintain that software falls to you, the end user.

If you don't mind, I'm curious to find out why you view the private cloud as un-cloud-like. I don't think the cloud is defined by where the service is hosted or even how the service is paid for. To me, cloud computing is defined by 3 big ideas.

1. Virtualization is key. I think the cloud is marked by a construction from dynamic pools of virtualized resources.

2. Instead of focusing on individual physical components, the cloud focuses on pools of compute resources. This seems to have led to higher priority for service delivery.

3. Finally, I think the cloud is defined by being convenient for the consumer instead of being convenient for the provider.

Within those constraints, I usually call a cloud private if it is under the control of an enterprise IT organization, in a way similar to older systems. I think of the cloud as public if the provider is mostly in control instead of the tenants.

With that definition of the private cloud in mind, the model offers a lot of advantages to larger IT departments. The private cloud allows IT teams to more quickly provision resources in support of business initiatives. It's also a better way to invest in IT infrastructure. The model is inherently scalable, which means that IT funds can be used to create value instead of keeping the lights on so to speak.

Obviously, private clouds aren't for every IT organization, but I think the private cloud has merit. As organizations globalize and just generally get big, economies of scale can be leveraged internally to increase the quality of IT projects and services.

I agree. A private cloud should also have a standard API, so that applications can be conveniently moved to a public cloud when it is secure and cost-effective to do so.

There; I disagree - if there were a standard API for clouds I might agree - otherwise, it makes sense for internal clouds to adopt the API most convenient for the end-users of that API. Sadly, that might mean something like SOAP, which would make me sad.

Exceedingly well put

I can't buy that "hosted apps" qualify as "cloud" - that means Hotmail, Yahoo mail and every single rich application on the internet, ever, qualifies as "cloud". We have a word for that - Internet.

I think a much more apt - and something more applicable to SFDC, is anything which exposes "architectural resources" - such as Platform, Storage, or Compute as a service/hosted system is a much better, and cleaner a term then throwing applications built on cloud technology into the mix. The cloud is the dynamic, elastic, "on demand" of resources, not the utilization of those resources.

I can't buy that "hosted apps" qualify as "cloud" - that means Hotmail, Yahoo mail and every single rich application on the internet, ever, qualifies as "cloud".

Yes.

We have a word for that - Internet.

You noticed that? :)

I think a much more apt - and something more applicable to SFDC, is anything which exposes "architectural resources" - such as Platform, Storage, or Compute as a service/hosted system is a much better, and cleaner a term then throwing applications built on cloud technology into the mix. The cloud is the dynamic, elastic, "on demand" of resources, not the utilization of those resources.

I think you are right, kind of. Developers talk about cloud computing, cloud storage etc to distinguish it from their traditional services.

However, non-developers don't see it like that. They see "email" as a resource, and the ability to elastically grow their email service as making it "in the cloud".

Here's a thought I've been toying with since reading your reply:

I think, as a term passed to non technical or lightly technical end-users, "the cloud" is largely useless. The cloud is not an "end user" feature except in the features that a cloud-based architecture might bring.

Taking your example - end users should never hear about "the cloud" when discussing email. All they care about is a hosted application that "just works" - having it based "on the cloud" is uninteresting, except by the features it brings with it, which they reap the benefits of.

So, maybe trying to use it when discussing things outside of mostly technical (IT personell, Devops folks, developers) is mostly useless except to denote a very specific (scalability, uptime) set of features and even then you're better off not talking about "the cloud" but the specific features, which are tangible to them.

Many of the people who talk about "the cloud" and - perhaps more importantly - spend money on it are only quasi-technical.

They are CIO's and managers in charge of purchasing an email solution. They know they need a "cloud strategy", and vendors are quite happy to tell them their solution is "cloud based" if it make them happy.

So yes - it's mostly useless as a technical term.

Actually, I was wondering the inverse - if using the cloud is only useful as a technical term rather then using it for some faceless/mindless strategy to a CIO or Manager.

Take for example, cloud storage. I would not sell "the cloud" part to a person, rather, I would sell them the fact that it's hosted and highly reliable, infinitely scalable, pay as you go and cheap compared to a local storage cluster buildout.

I wouldn't sell them the cloud part, as not all things in, on and around the cloud inherit all the features the cloud might bring (meaning, you can screw up an architecture no matter where it's implemented).

What you are saying makes perfect sense.

But unfortunately many times the people with the budget don't actually care about the features. The word "cloud" is important to them because their CEO read about it in a glossy magazine, so they need to be "cloud enabled"

You need to be careful, though because sometimes "cloud" is seen as a negative. I've seen companies that state "We don't believe in the cloud and we have a purchasing policy that excludes any cloud based solutions" - but then you dig deeper and find how proud they are of the "hosted solution" they bought from a vendor because of the way they don't have to pay for capacity until they use it.

Sigh..

(Advice for young players: Enterprise sales will kill your soul)

"it's hosted and highly reliable, infinitely scalable, pay as you go and cheap"

You can say it shorter - it's cloud.

Sometimes in a casual conversation it is convenient shorthand to refer to a use of a hosted app as "on the cloud," even if technically speaking "hosted apps" don't qualify as "cloud." It means basically "running on a system where I don't have to care about administration of the computing resources," and hotmail certainly qualifies.

I don't know how much we disagree - except that using the term "cloud based" denotes that your infrastructure is "elsewhere" and your application rests on top of it.

It does not, however, make your application "the cloud" - hosted applications are just that; hosted applications. Hotmail is not a cloud application, it might have a cloud back end, it might run on Azure, etc, etc but it's not "the cloud"

Perhaps some of the disconnect is that it's not easily explainable to non techie types without going in to more detail. The Gmail/Office example you gave holds true for any web app, regardless of it is hosted on Force.com, a $9/mo hosting plan, or a server I run out of my apartment. Computational power as a commodity resource is a little more in depth than most people probably care to go, but it leaves many with the impression that the internet is the cloud.

Good point, and an important distinction to make for more technical audiences. Scalable, elastic pay-as-you-go architecture is a key attribute of cloud computing as well.

Your requirements describe a web-site. Nothing more.

Also, your alternative explanations are very Microsoft/Windows focused.

I find your definition of the cloud as very confusing and very limiting.

Do you really use SFDC as shorthand for SalesForce.com or was that a riff?

I've worked with a lot of Salesforce.com partners and customers and the acronym SFDC is universally used.

We use SFDC very widely internally, and I've also seen it occasionally on Twitter/FB.

The use of the term "the Cloud" is basically for anything that's not the traditional way of requesting and utilizing IT resources (aka rigid, pre-allocated, persistent and more than likely tied to physical systems). And that's probably why you're seeing so many different definitions.

What I think "cloud" should mean is the combining of individual resources (computing, storage, etc.) into a large virtual pool that can be accessed and allocated dynamically. This can be done within a corporation's own set of servers and devices (private cloud) or by tapping into someone else's collection of resources (public cloud providers like Amazon, Azure, etc.).

Completely agreed; which is why "private cloud" isn't as an insane a term as you might initially suspect (as I did when I first heard it).

If you have a global company, such as GE running it's own "private cloud" where CPU, Storage and platforms can be spun up by departments, users and others "on demand" and destroyed just as quickly, and it's distributed, fault-tolerant and modular in architecture - why should that not qualify as "cloud"?

To me, a cloud is a distributed system of computing resources where the resources can be dynamically allocated with an API. A hosted application should be able to increase or decrease the available processors, memory, and disk without human intervention. Human oversight should be implemented at points where it makes sense for business and security, rather than at points dictated by the limitations of technology. This means a cloud should do be able to do significant automated management of DNS, networking, and provisioning of fundamental operating system details.

The line between any classic distributed system or cluster and a 'cloud' is blurry, but generally speaking a cloud's API should be internet-compatible and capable of using commodity hardware to scale up with minimal (and preferably asynchronous) intervention from system administrators.

As for 'The Cloud' -- currently I don't think there is 'The Cloud' the way there is 'The World Wide Web', but it's theoretically possible. Right now 'The Cloud' generally means 'A Public Cloud', which is a publicly available distributed system like the one I described above. A Virtual Private Hosting service is not a cloud, because allocation of resources typically involves a sales contract of some sort. But the service itself it might theoretically run on a cloud, and you can build a cloud out of VPSs.

If my mum starting using The Cloud in sentences she would mean "The Internet", she doesn't have the concept of a server, and doesn't really need to, she just knows it's "Out there somewhere".

I think it would be unlikely for one of my peers (mostly developers) to mention "The Cloud" unless they were trying to be intensionally buzzwordy for comedy effect. They would be more specific.

I/We would however say:

  a cloud to mean clusters machines (probably split into VPSs)
  xxxx's cloud to mean xxxx's server infrastructure/platform

I like The Cloud as a common term to mean "Stored/Processed out there in the internet somewhere", not as a well defined technical term.

I think it feels "buzzwordy" because too many people abuse it. It is a legitimate term but it is being stretched to the point where it is no longer useful. To me a cloud is a system where I can dynamically change my resource usage without having to really understand the underlying structure supporting it. I don't install an OS, I don't monitor specific servers for failure, I never upgrade anything; that level of minutiae is abstracted away.

This is a valid definition... but it's not most people's definition. For example, if you are running on ec2, well, you've still gotta install the OS (granted, there are tools that make it easier, but you still have to do it, and you still have to keep up with security patches, etc..) you've still gotta deal with failure, deal with upgrades, etc...

Granted, you could say that ec2 isn't cloud... you could say that ec2 is a VPS system with a decent and fast provisioning API. Your definition would say that hiroku and google app engine are 'cloud' - something few people would argue with... it's just that most people call ec2 'cloud' as well.

This, I think, is why most technical people find the term 'cloud' to be useless... there isn't a strong and generally accepted definition that isn't so nebulous as to be not very useful.

I don't think the need to consider maintenance and scalability removes something from the definition of "the cloud" - consider the fact that on modern VPSes and EC2 I can spin up new resources within a heartbeat - sure, I still have to think about stuff, but instance on for elastic resources is what I think caused the "cloud" term to come into being.

so your definition of the cloud differs from the definition ryanelkins gave. This is all well and good, both the "completely abstracts hardware and OS details" definition that Ryan gave and the "just allows you to really quickly provision new hardware" definition you gave are fine definitions, and both are useful services in many cases. but my point is that you get five nerds in a room and you are going to have at least three completely different definitions of "cloud"

You're right - and that worries me (personally, and professionally). I do think it's time the collective "we" start being a little bit more responsible with the term, so that others might.

Otherwise I'm worried we're going to see someone try to rebrand the internet as "the cloud" and then we're all doomed :)

I think "the cloud" has never had a solid, specific meaning, and it probably never will. I don't begrudge marketing and middle management their own set of jargon. Really, letting marketing and middle management have their own overly vague words can be good sometimes. If the boss asks you to put something "In the cloud" you have a lot of latitude to choose the solution that is most suitable for the situation.

Hell, maybe "cloud" will end up in the vague but useful category like "solution" I mean, sure, "solution" is even more broad than "cloud", but sometimes it seems more concise than "product or service" in a sentence, so it's still a word that I use sometimes.

For me, it is the idea of outsourcing infrastructure and treating computers as a utility.

yes, agree. I think this is the talk from startup school where bezos used this metaphor : http://wn.com/jeff_bezos_at_startup_school_08

Computers I can't see and don't own. Suspiciously similar to a botnet.

Actually I'm less paranoid about it than that, but only slightly.

How does that make Amazon AWS (which most people would call "cloud infrastructure") any different from traditional shared hosting?

"The cloud means replacing your ops team with a clip-art picture of a cloud--PROBLEM SOLVED." --Coda Hale

IMO, cloud service is any service that a) scalable on demand, b)has ~100% uptime, c) require no maintenance from customer. It doesn't matter whether it is one server or 10000 servers - if it fits this model of consumption - it's cloud.

So cloud service is an outsourced mainframe? That's about the only thing that fits all 3.

Why not, say, youtube?

Whenever someone asks me what I think of cloud computing, I just reply with this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14o

For me personally, I'd largely agree with your first definition - but I would expand it to services run on "private clouds" (ie, a corporate having a couple hundred virtual machines on a rack full of blades I would consider "cloud based").

However, if I look at our customers (techies and enthusiasts who build their own computers), they define a cloud based service as anything primarily online - IE, your second definition. I think this definition is gaining ground.

I don't think of the cloud as just a server elsewhere on the internet, but more of a group of servers, like EC2, or Windows Azure, where the data is shared between them, and backed up in various places.

I have heard many people refer to the internet in general as 'the cloud', which I can understand, but I don't think of that as it's primary definition.

Optimist: Decentralized infrastructure that powers 21st century commerce and acts as an infinite storage space for personal files.

Pessimist: Data Star (Earth's version of the Death Star) that will just become another way for more ads to find us where ever we go in space and in time...

Most people couldn't put their finger on exactly what Cloud is, but they don't realize they fail because they don't understand the True Nature of Cloud.

A cloud is not Azure. It is not AWS. It is not Rackspace.

A cloud is not definable by what it is, but by what it is not.

Asking for a definition of a cloud, is like asking for the definitive IP Address of www.amazon.com.

A cloud is a hand-wavy indirection, and abstraction of a compute or storage infrastructure.

Each of the products you mentioned are not Cloud. They are manifestations of a cloud. But they are not the Cloud, as they are no longer abstract.

A cloud is a visible mass of droplets of water or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body. (c) wikipedia.

To me it means not being in control of my own data.

Outsourced data center on a pay-per-use basis.

I think of it, at least this week, as:

  resilient Internet services with persistence

To me, the cloud means trusting the base performance and uptime of my application to someone else.

The (generally) light fluffy things in the air that produce rain.

There are already 33 comments here, and not a lot of agreement. "The Cloud" just seems to me to be more marketing sucker-bait, basically (Web 2.0)2.0, I wonder what they are going to call ((Web 2.0)2.0)2.0?

I'm biased; but I suspect that much like "Web 2.0" there is some truth to the "marketing". Web 2.0 saw the rise of user generated content, richer/leaner and more interactive websites and applications.

I suspect the "cloud" trend will continue to allow us to abstract more of our computing resources, and make computing/application construction pieces more of a utility/commodity then they ever have been.

So despite it being used a bit too much in marketing - I think there's some fire behind all the smoke, and dismissing it simply because marketing people are blowing it around a lot runs the risk of ignoring a major technological shift.

There is always some truth in effective marketing; like all good lies, it uses truth in the service of falsehood.

to me it means: computing power behind an api.

so my scripts can manage the data center (by growing/shrinking resource usage)

Seriously, after all these years aren't we past this repetitive question?

I think it came from one of those network diagrams where you have :

local server <> picture of a cloud <> remote user

I now have to deal with management types who have read too many magazines wanting their data stored "in the cloud".

The management of the company I share an office with is seriously thinking about moving all their email "into the cloud" because the person that was responsible for backup did it wrong and they lost some important emails. They now associate "in the cloud" with "reliable". They are paying for an expensive consultant to come in and tell them what to do.

> many people say they are in "the Cloud" where they define the cloud as a server on the internet.

To me, cloud would mean that the service has very good reliability, which your run of the mill "server on the internet" does not necessarily have.