Five characteristics of cloud computing
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of cloud computing defines five distinct characteristics. In honor of Thanksgiving, I’m illustrating the distinct characteristics via my Turkey dinner—Turkey as a Service (TaaS).
A little background: Like most, our TaaS is quite sophisticated with advanced federation. Erin delivers the Spinach dish, Pete delivers the Cranberry Salsa and I deliver the pies—the right amount at the right time at the right place. Betty provides the core infrastructure (Turkey gravy, stuffing, etc.).
A buffet exemplifies on-demand and self-service provisioning, the first characteristic of a cloud computing service. The second characteristic is broad access from a wide range of devices, illustrated by varying food choices enabling all to meet their unique (dietary) requirements from a common pool of shared resources (the third characteristic).
Rapid resource provisioning and release is the fourth characteristic. Rapid provisioning is obvious: From empty plate to Tryptophan coma in minutes. Unfortunately, the analogy breaks down a bit here. In a perfect TaaS all food left on the plate would return to the common pool. I’ll stick with an imperfect TaaS! The final characteristic is metering. Actually, metering would have been great! Though not metered, our consumption was closely monitored to make sure that the serving plates were always full.
Given resources limited to our group I consider this a private TaaS. This is one of four deployment models as defined by NIST and in a later post we’ll talk about the other three: Community, Public and Hybrid.
