I did a new diagram last December while thinking about how to expand some of my earlier thoughts regarding what the Cloud Computing Stack looks like from top to bottom so to speak.

Here is my newest version of this diagram which builds upon some of the earlier work posted in this blog.Cloud Computing Stack
I do need to give some credit where credit is due as some of my thinking came from marking up a very nice diagram done by Lamia Youseff. Here is the marked up version I did when she released that diagram a while back.Cloud Computing from Lamia Youseff (Marked up by Kent)

One of the the rather interesting things to point out is that again and again I come down to four things replicated up and down the stack. They are storage, memory, network, and compute.

I've seen an awful lot of buzz in this "ontology" area recently so I'm hoping this adds some value here and not more noise. We shall see! Let me know what you think.

I expect to write more about my thinking here in coming days and weeks. I've been testing this diagram out a lot with people and using it to explain things like traditional hosting in relation to cloud computing / hosting, explain why people call SaaS a cloud, explain what the hosting providers relationship is to the server supplier, virtualization vendors, and more. It's been pretty useful for me thus far.