I've been resisting adhering to various attempts people have been making to classify or particularly define "cloud computing" because I have felt that it's a concept that is still being defined in some ways, and in others is destined to remain somewhat ephemeral by nature. I think that the term is, and will remain, fairly well understood by those in the technology industry who are interested in the concept on its own merits and not simply for the benefit which it may bring their product or service as a marketing buzzword.

But after reading this New York Times article on cloud computing, I realized that it's probably time to take a stab at defining what it is I mean when I say it. It's definitely not what the Times means; I don't consider Salesforce a cloud (although both for marketing purposes and driven by the inexorable needs of the market itself, their services certainly have taken on some cloud-like aspects... but they remain too well delineated to meet my definition and probably always will) for instance, or Facebook; the various Amazon Web Services, on the other hand, certainly reflect my conception of cloud computing.

When I think of a service as cloud computing, it is characterized by being an offering of nearly unlimited capacity (although it may be billed differently at different utilizations) which has some sort of generic utility but beyond certain minimal architectural requirements there should be no inherent specificity in what it may or should do. It may be a service of a certain type of utility, perhaps storage, raw processing capability, or data storage, but in the same way that a datacenter does not restrict what servers you may host with them, it should not restrict what sort of data you store, process, or serve.

Cloud computing represents, to me, a generic sort of engine that will power whatever sort of application you can dream up to put it to. It's not just software as a service; it's just the "service" running software that you conceive and build or commission.

It's a new term, and there's nothing in the dictionary, so of course the Times is entitled to its definition as much as I am mine, or as anyone is to theirs. But when I say it, that's the sort of thing I am referring to, and heaven forbid the useful blurriness of the term is conscripted into meaninglessness by the marketers and flacks of the world.