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I hear about vendors and service providers talking about virtualization, cloud computing, grid computing, and utility computing on a daily basis. Now throw in terms like unified computing from vendors like Cisco and you have a recipe for confusion in the marketplace. Staff members at my own company sometimes mix up terms like grid computing and cloud computing. And many marketing departments from traditional service providers take great liberties with these terms.

Virtualization is not cloud computing.

I hate to break it to ya but virtualization isn’t cloud computing. Virtualization is nothing more than a brick in the cloud computing house. It’s purely an infrastructure component. I don’t think it is necessarily even a requirement for a cloud computing infrastructure. Cloud computing abstracts computing resources from hardware from the perspective of the end user. You can’t just stand up a couple vmware servers and claim that you now have a cloud. I know vmware and some service providers would like you to believe that.

Grid computing is not cloud computing.

I’m probably going to upset some of the “grid hosting” providers out there when I say that their notion of a grid is marketechture at best. You can find true grid computing in academic circles and high-performance computing environments. Grid computing requires specialized architectures and purposefully written software applications that can run on distributed systems. You can’t run your Windows application on a grid. Think Beowulf clusters. Grid hosting marketechture is nothing more than a group of individual servers running hypervisors that are on the same vlan. These servers, and the computing resources they represent, are effectively silos.

ASP (application service provider) is not cloud computing.

Some vendors have related cloud computing to the ASP-model over the past year — usually in a dismissive tone. Their belief is that cloud computing is just another name for ASP 2.0. The big difference between cloud computing and the ASP model is that the cloud is designed to host a generic class of applications whereas the ASP model is purposely designed to handle specific applications. For example, the Amazon or Rackspace clouds can host an infinite set of applications. Whereas Microsoft Hosted Services are designed to provide rental of specific applications like Microsoft Exchange. You could say that Microsoft’s hosted services live in the “cloud”. But you would be hard pressed to say that this type of service makes Microsoft a cloud computing provider.

The Internet is not cloud computing.

I’ve seen this analogy creep into vendor-speak over the past year. Technical people traditionally referred to the Internet as the “cloud”. In fact many of us would literally draw a cloud when sketching out a network infrastructure connected to the Internet. So the thinking goes that if you connect a computer server to the Internet you now offer computing in the cloud — or cloud computing. This analogy ignores the business model and processes offered by cloud computing and focuses solely on infrastructure. See the “virtualization is not cloud computing” rant above. It is absolutely possible to build a cloud computing environment that is not connected to the Internet.

Utility computing could be cloud computing.

Utility computing is probably the closest traditional definition to what we call cloud computing today. Utility computing is defined as the packaging of computing resources as a metered service similar to a public utility. Utility computing allows the customer to rent resources versus paying for the acquisition of computing servers. This definition sounds awfully close to cloud computing. Cloud computing could be called utility computing 2.0. I’ll cover this more in the future.