I'd like a little cloud please...

Cloud computing refers to an IT service model and platform that provides on-demand based IT services over the Internet.

It is composed of 5 essential characteristics, 4 deployment models and 3 service models.

Five essential characteristics

• on-demand self-service
• broad network access
• resource pooling
• rapid elasticity
• measured Service

Four major deployment models

• private cloud
• public cloud
• community cloud
• hybrid cloud

Three service models

• SasS (Software as a Service)
• salesforce.com – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service, Google Gmail
• PaaS (Platform as a Service)
• Google App Engine, Microsoft’s Azure
• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), VMware vCloud Datacenter