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Cloud Computing environments do allow customers to run their own applications on the cloud provider's infrastructure. Therefore the cloud is an actual thing owned by a company providing a service. The primary service value for the customer comes from being able to use an infrastructure that isn't their own, resulting in capital savings. Additional value from outsourcing is derived because the burdensome management of the service is done by someone else – it's someone else's business to make it work.

Two's Company, Three's A Cloud

The cloud itself is actually quite complex. As described previously, this is an "array of technologies," each of which is itself new and complex. In fact, the bonding together of these technologies into something we can call "a cloud" has sidelined some of those

technologies, so their names (once new and exciting) are now old hat. Not very long ago, Utility Computing was a grand concept; now it just means renting time on a grid of CPUs. Virtualization is now just swapping kernel images from one computer to another. Software as a Service (SaaS) is simply hosting a product application on an external grid accessed via the internet with your web browser. So in Cloud Computing is some new architecture putting together all these different technologies? Or is this a form of advanced IT mashup? Is Cloud Computing, as Ephraim Schwartz of Information World would have it "an architecture whose natural state is a shared pool outside the enterprise" If so, what is that new architecture that ties it all together?

Rajkumar Buyya (in email on cloud-computing@googlegroups.com) describes the cloud architecture as "… a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of interconnected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources based on service-level agreements established

There is still much debate on just what this cloud architecture is – perhaps because the word comes from Marketing rather than IT. But actually it's necessary to have a new architecture to make Cloud Computing more than an outsourced data center. And the new architecture can't be a simple repackaging of the older notion of utility computing – even if it needs shared resource utilization at its core. There are several reasons for this. Specific business features like SLAs are not merely attached, but embedded in the service architecture. The Cloud is formed by spinning applications out into the network and letting them float as needed. The cloud is network virtualization of applications, and perhaps also of data. Cloud computing is Internet-based, shared, service-oriented computing. Cloud Computing holistically fuses many new technologies, systematic use of the network, and a change in business model.