Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud

This paper tries to present a very useful, but simplified taxonomy on the cloud computing paradigm. There could be a little murmer about its attempt to keep aside the 'private clouds' in its discussion paper. Private clouds presents an excellent new business for box, software, bandwidth and storage vendors. Industry leaders such as IBM, Sun, HP and Oracle are sure to capitalize on this momentum. UC paper defines its taxonomy on the Public Cloud, and places Amazon EC2 on the beginning of the spectrum , places Google App Engine platform on the far end and puts Microsoft Azure in between them for justifiable reasons. The taxonomy on the Public Cloud presents Cloud Providers-( SaaS Providers/Cloud User) - SaaS User in three distinct tiers. It discounts all other 'XaaS' where X cloud be Hardware, Platform, Communications etc. This is a diring approach and really serves the purpose well. The paper also consolidates the well discussed 'inhibitors' into a Top 10 and suggests opportunities against all of them. The paper takes a highly practical approach based on 'what is available in the market' rather than mixing it with 'what is/could be happening in the laboratories'.  I recommend   this paper for all beginners as well as practitioners on cloud computing.