Cloud Computing Glossary

A

Advertising based pricing model

A pricing model that offers services to customers at low or no cost, with the provider being compensated by advertisers whose ads are delivered to the consumer along with the service.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Apache Hadoop

A project sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation. See also: hadoop

AWS

Amazon Web Services - Amazon's suite of cloud services (includes EC2, RDS, S3, SQS and VPC) that together make up their cloud computing platform.

Azure

Microsoft's cloud computing platform. See also: Windows Azure

B

BPaaS

Business Process as a Service — A complete business process is provided as a service - such as billing, HR, payroll, advertising, etc.

BPOS

Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. Online versions of Microsoft's messaging and collaboration solutions. It includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online.

C

CCMM

Cloud Computing Maturity Model. Defines five stages of evolution for an enterprise data center to migrate to cloud computing. The five stages are: consolidation, virtualization, automation, utility and cloud.

CDN

Content delivery network — A system consisting of multiple computers that contain copies of data, which are located in different places on the network so clients can access the copy closest to them.

Cloud application

The top layer of the Cloud Computing Stack where applications interact with client web browsers. Examples: Gmail and Salesforce.com

Cloud broker

An entity that creates and maintains relationships with multiple cloud service providers. It acts as a liaison between cloud services customers and cloud service providers, selecting the best provider for each customer and monitoring the services.

Cloud bursting

Cloud bursting is a technique used by hybrid clouds to provide additional resources to private clouds on an as-needed basis. If the private cloud has the processing power to handle its workloads, the hybrid cloud is not used. When workloads exceed…

Cloudsourcing

The outsourcing of some IT operations to lower cost cloud services. Example: data backup

Community cloud

A cloud infrastructure that is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community.

D

Disruptive technology

A term used in the business world to describe innovations that improve products or services in unexpected ways and change both the way things are done and the market. Cloud computing is often referred to as a disruptive technology because it has the…

E

EC2

Elastic Compute Cloud. See also: Amazon EC2

F

Federation

Federation is the act of combining data or identities across multiple systems. Federation can be done by a cloud provider or by a cloud broker.

Force.com

Force.com is the Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering from Salesforce.com. See also: PaaS

G

Google Apps

Google’s SaaS offering that includes an office productivity suite, email, and document sharing, as well as Gmail, Google Talk for instant messaging, Google Calendar and Google Docs, spreadsheets, and presentations.