A while ago I posted my take on "Defining the Cloud" that was mostly tongue in cheek, but I also made a comment about the NIST definition of cloud:
"Can you elaborate as to why you hate the "pay per use," portion of the definition?" And I replied:
In the comments, "Jeff" asked:
Yes, mostly because my position is that cloud should focus on technical architecture and ppu is a pricing model. If the "cloud" thrives (which I am not convinced it will) then demand will go up, scalability will take over, and all the providers will convert to a subscription service (people like ppu when they are dabbling and subscription when they become heavy users).
So I see it as limiting* and unnecessary.
*This might seem strange since I am railing on the all-encompassing nature of the cloud, but at this stage the buzz is too strong and the cloud has lost all meaning.
I recently was researching the Eucalyptus open-source, private cloud offering and found this:
Myth #4: "Clouds only provide 'pay-as-you-go' access."
One of the most attractive features of the public clouds is that they allow users to change their resource usage dynamically in response to customer demand or offered load, and to pay only for the resources being used from moment to moment. While this type of charging is an important feature, it is by no means the only method a cloud can and should support. In particular, if an allocation is to be shared among several users within a single organization, it may make more sense to offer a maximum resource quota on a subscription basis to keep conflicting resource needs from causing confusion. If multiple users are to share the VMs within a single allocation, enabling all of them to acquire and release resources dynamically (possible resources in use by other users of the allocation) can lead to chaos.
This is an excellent illustration of my point - putting something so arbitrary in a definition welcomes the opportunity to ignore the definition entirely (heck, there are 20+ to choose from).
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