Cloud Computing: Nomenclature Issues

The nomenclature for cloud computing, or the model for services consumed on a utility basis, has drawn much criticism and caused much confusion.

For those of you who are not aware, cloud computing draws its name from the fact that IT resources are "in the cloud", meaning that they are somewhere on the Internet, off your network. (A stylized cloud is often used to represent the Internet in architecture diagrams.) The most common term for cloud computing is the "as-a-Service" suffix: infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), software (SaaS), and storage (such as Amazon's S3). Clearly, IaaS and PaaS are derived directly from the hardware and development platforms and provide users with instances of the underlying resources on demand while storage is the use of storage media as a resource. SaaS, however, poses a problem: is software "cloud computing"? SaaS splits the community into two distinct camps: yes, SaaS is cloud computing because it is available in the cloud; no, SaaS is not cloud computing because you are subscribing to software on a monthly basis (unlike the utility model for IaaS and PaaS).

The NIST defines cloud computing as follows:
"Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models."

This definition leaves a bit of room for interpretation. Because of this, I propose alternate terms: "Cloud Based Services", "Services in the Cloud", or "Cloud Services". Each of these terms indicate that the services are consumed (be they IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or storage) are located or based in the cloud and do not confuse the issue of SaaS being a compute resource per se.

While the terms "Cloud Based Services", "Services in the Cloud", and "Cloud Services" are not revolutionary, they clarify the concept and are inclusive of the various forms of cloud computing.