In reponse to: http://www.newsoftwarepathways.com/blog/?p=18

I posted the following. Just thought I'd post it here too since it got long and I've been slacking lately!

Are private Clouds – mainly from corporate citizens – included in IaaS?

Absolutely. That's the whole point! Corporate citizens buying infrastructure as a service. As an IaaS provider, I'm seeing this trend progress significantly.

What is the difference between EC2 and a bunch of HP or Sun boxes with a hypervisor?

The API mostly I suppose. EC2 got the API right first. Now, others are following. Xen and VMWare have had some semblance of an API for ages. But, it took Amazon and their published EC2 API to really make it fly.

A agree that the cloud is the computer. That's more or less what I was saying when I wrote http://www.productionscale.com/home/2008/8/21/cloud-computing-back-down-to-earth.html

What I think is most interesting is that it's Software and the developers that write it that are having a difficult transition to the cloud. Most of the applications that people use and are writing today do not run well in a cloud or the just don't really run all that much better. You still get some benefits to be sure, but not the TRUE benefits. These true benefits require people to essentially adopt many of the practices of the HPC world along the lines of distributed parallel programming methodologies.

I wrote several things a few months ago as well that have much in common with your thoughts here. I would be interesting to compare notes.

http://www.productionscale.com/home/category/cloud-computing

Original Article here: http://www.newsoftwarepathways.com/blog/?p=18