Thank you so much for your future answers . Tucker.

“Can you elaborate as to why you hate the “pay per use,” portion of the definition?”

Yes, mostly because my position is that cloud should focus on technical architecture and ppu is a pricing model. If the “cloud” thrives (which I am not convinced it will) then demand will go up, scalability will take over, and all the providers will convert to a subscription service (people like ppu when they are dabbling and subscription when they become heavy users).

So I see it as limiting* and unnecessary.

*This might seem strange since I am railing on the all-encompassing nature of the cloud, but at this stage the buzz is too strong and the cloud has lost all meaning.

Can you elaborate as to why you hate the “pay per use,” portion of the definition? To me, it seems that the costs of provisioning for load peaks (whether daily peaks or annual peaks) is a major cost of any site at scale, and simply by aggregating onto a common platform the sum of the peaks is less than the peaks of the sums (which is a common benefit of virtualization).

My definition of “enterprise” cloud:

* Network delivered
* Scalable (typically in multiple dimensions, such IO transactions/second and capacity)
* Single image, multi-tenant
* SLA backed
* Abstraction layer/API encompasses the hardware (provisioning), running systems, billing, and metering
* No up front capital
* Users of the cloud benefit from, and are insulated against the negative aspects of underlying technology change (no more server migration projects!)
* The platform gets better for everyone as users are added (as opposed to storage networks, for example)
* Allows for running your application on a platform that is far better than could be economically developed in house

Disclaimer: I’m with Zetta, an enterprise storage service provider, typically described as “cloud.”