Cloud Computing Glossary

Cloud Computing: Cloud Computing represents a new way to deploy computing technology to give users the ability to acces, work on, share and store the information using the Internet. The cloud itself is a network of data centers that can perform the functions on a personal or business computer by providing users access to powerful applications, platform, and services delivered over the internet. Learn More

Cloud Computing Services: cloud providers fall into three categories: software-as-a-service providers that offer web-based applications; infrastructure-as-a-service vendors that offer Web-based access to storage and computing power; and platform-as-a-service vendors that give developers the tools to build and host Web applications. Learn More

SaaS: Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, is a software delivery method that provides access to software and its functions remotely as a Web-based service. SaaS allows organizations to access business functionality at a cost typically less than paying for licensed applications since SaaS pricing is based on a monthly fee. Also, because the software is hosted remotely, users don't need to invest in additional hardware. SaaS removes the need for organizations to handle the installation, set-up and often daily upkeep and maintenance. Learn More

PaaS: Platform as a service, or PaaS, is one of the categories of Cloud Computing; it delivers a fully baked application development environment you can subscribe to and use immediately; with PaaS, developers use free programming tools offered by the service provider to create applications and deploy them in the cloud. The infrastructure is offered by the PaaS provider or its partners, which charge by some usage metric such as CPU use or page views. Learn More

IaaS: Infrastructure-as-a-service, or IaaS, is the category of cloud computing that refers to Web-based access to storage and computing power on the cloud. It is also known as the ‘Elastic Cloud’ as the server capacity and application back-end scalability could be extended based on application’s users demand. Included in this category are providers of infrastructure software needed to deploy private clouds based on virtualization technologies. Learn More

Public Cloud: a public cloud is a service that anyone can tap into with a network connection and a credit card. "Public clouds are shared infrastructures with pay-as-you-go economics," explains Forrester analyst James Staten in an April report. "Public clouds are easily accessible, multitenant virtualized infrastructures that are managed via a self-service portal."

Private Cloud: A private cloud attempts to mimic the delivery models of public cloud vendors but does so entirely within the firewall for the benefit of an enterprise's users. A private cloud would be highly virtualized, stringing together mass quantities of IT infrastructure into one or a few easily managed logical resource pools.

Cloud Operating System: A cloud operating system is a new category of software that is specifically designed to holistically manage large collections of infrastructure – CPUs, storage, networking – as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment. Analogous to the operating system that manages the complexity of an individual machine, the cloud operating system manages the complexity of a datacenter. Learn More

Virtualization: Virtualization is the creation of a virtual version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources. Operating system virtualization is the use of software to allow a piece of hardware to run multiple operating system images at the same time. The technology got its start on mainframes decades ago, allowing administrators to avoid wasting expensive processing power. Learn More

Virtual Machine: A virtual machine (VM) is an environment, usually a program or operating system, which does not physically exist but is created within another environment. In this context, a VM is called a "guest" while the environment it runs within is called a "host." Virtual machines are often created to execute an instruction set different than that of the host environment. One host environment can often run multiple VMs at once. Because VMs are separated from the physical resources they use, the host environment is often able to dynamically assign those resources among them.

Utility Computing: Utility computing is a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a flat rate. Like other types of on-demand computing (such as grid computing), the utility model seeks to maximize the efficient use of resources and/or minimize associated costs.

Grid computing (or the use of a computational grid) is applying the resources of many computers in a network to a single problem at the same time - usually to a scientific or technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.