This is a great guest post on gigaom.com by Geva Perry, CMO for Gigaspaces. For all of you out there that have been wonding what IS cloud computing anyway? Here is an excerpt from this very nice article:

Self-healing: In case of failure, there will be a hot backup instance of the application ready to take over without disruption (known as failover). It also means that when I set a policy that says everything should always have a backup, when such a fail occurs and my backup becomes the primary, the system launches a new backup, maintaining my reliability policies.
SLA-driven: The system is dynamically managed by service-level agreements that define policies such as how quickly responses to requests need to be delivered. If the system is experiencing peaks in load, it will create additional instances of the application on more servers in order to comply with the committed service levels — even at the expense of a low-priority application.
Multi-tenancy: The system is built in a way that allows several customers to share infrastructure, without the customers being aware of it and without compromising the privacy and security of each customer’s data.
Service-oriented: The system allows composing applications out of discrete services that are loosely coupled (independent of each other). Changes to or failure of one service will not disrupt other services. It also means I can re-use services.
Virtualized: Applications are decoupled from the underlying hardware. Multiple applications can run on one computer (virtualization a la VMWare) or multiple computers can be used to run one application (grid computing).
Linearly Scalable: Perhaps the biggest challenge. The system will be predictable and efficient in growing the application. If one server can process 1,000 transactions per second, two servers should be able to process 2,000 transactions per second, and so forth.
Data, Data, Data: The key to many of these aspects is management of the data: its distribution, partitioning, security and synchronization. New technologies, such as Amazon’s SimpleDB, are part of the answer, not large-scale relational databases. And don’t let the name fool you. As my colleague Nati Shalom rightfully proclaims, SimpleDB is not really a database. Another approach that is gaining momentum is in-memory data grids.

Very interesting and worth it to read. The part I liked the best was this gem,

"The way the industry has traditionally built software applications just won’t cut it on the cloud."

AMEN and make that two AMEN's! People, listen up, you can't keep doing the same thing you've been doing since 1997 or longer and expect it to run in the cloud. It just doesn't work right.

Lastly, to quote just a little more (sorry to quote so much, you just said a lot!)

"Utility computing relates to the business model in which application infrastructure resources — hardware and/or software — are delivered. While cloud computing relates to the way we design, build, deploy and run applications that operate in an a virtualized environment, sharing resources and boasting the ability to dynamically grow, shrink and self-heal."

The original article is published on GigaOM and the direct link is here.