On Sunday March 11th, I had the pleasure of attending CloudCamp in downtown Austin during SXSW. If you aren’t familiar with it, CloudCamp is an “unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.” It was hosted by Dave Nielsen (@davenielsen), and was attended by a variety of vendors, cloud computing administrators, and folks like me who wanted to learn more about OpenStack and the complementary tool chains & use cases.
CloudCamp started off with a series of lightning talks – which are typically 5-7 minute mini-presentations. The goal is to quickly impart information and ideas to the audience without drowning them in PowerPoint or vendor jibber-jabber. I took a good deal of notes, and present one of the lightning talks below.
Dave Nielsen – definition of cloud computing
Dave initially defined cloud computing according to NIST’s definition (warning: pdf)
- on demand self-service
- broad network access
- resource pooling
- rapid elasticity
- measured service
Dave then followed that with CloudCamp’s definition of cloud computing:
- On-demand
- Self service
- Scalable
- Measured
To put it simply, and to make it easier to remember, cloud computing is “OSSM“.
You can follow Dave on Twitter at @davenielsen.