More clouds...

I recently stumbled upon a couple articles that I think do a pretty good job at providing some more clarity around 'cloud computing'.

Cloud computing service models by Dan Orlando (IBM developerWorks)

Cloud Computing - A Primer by T. Sridhar (Cisco Internet Protocol Journal)

These are not necessarily vendor-neutral, but do add some detail about common terms and characteristics to be aware of related to cloud computing. Things like:

• elasticity
• virtualization
• resiliency
  
• multi-tenancy
• cloudbursting

Another thing that was covered is the movement towards standardization (which seems to be slow at best). The goal here is to minimize the effect of vendor-lock in (which is not really a motivator for most vendors).

However, there seem to be a couple efforts underway that look promising:

• Open Virtualization Format
  
• Simple Cloud API