Is cloud computing just a particular kind of SaaS?

In a Jerry Held post I just praised, there was one thing I disagreed with. Jerry wrote of cloud analytics:

This shouldn't be confused with software as a service (SaaS) models. Cloud customers are, in effect, renting dedicated servers and the people needed to house, secure, and manage them. These cloud offerings are more secure than multi-tenant SaaS models in which data from one customer may co-exist with data from another customer within the same application. Cloud customers have full control over server and firewall settings to ensure security.

To me, that sounds like an exaggerated distinction. Jerry is indeed right that there's a difference in whether what's exposed to you on a remote basis is application or system software. Application software users generally don't get to mess around with database administration or firewall settings. System software users generally do.

But multi-tenancy vs. single tenancy shared vs. single tenancy dedicated servers? Those are just differences in the feature sets. If I moved my blogs to dedicated servers, because I was tired of the outages caused by bad scripts running in other applications on my host, that wouldn't mean I was using a fundamentally different kind of service. It would simply mean I was willing to pay up for certain features, just as I now refuse to use a web host that doesn't employ separate firewall appliances to defend against the kind of email floods that brought my blogs down last December.

Am I an outlier here? Or do most people agree that cloud computing is just a particular way of delivering SaaS?

• Software
• cloud computing
• SaaS
• software as a service