Sky Computing

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing is revolutionizing how we approach computing. Compute resource consumers can eliminate the expense inherent in acquiring, managing, and operating IT infrastructure and instead lease resources on a pay-as-you-go basis. IT infrastructure providers can exploit economies of scale to mitigate the cost of buying and operating resources and avoid the complexity required to manage multiple customer-specific environments and applications. The authors describe the context in which cloud computing arose, discuss its current strengths and shortcomings, and point to an emerging computing pattern it enables that they call sky computing.

Interoperability and Service Levels

IaaS exposes an API that lets a client programmatically provision and securely take ownership of customized computer infrastructure for an agreed-upon time period. To create a reliable sky computing platform, we need such capability to be uniformly available across providers. Users must be able to easily compare offerings from different providers - choosing between qualities of service (for example, availability, reliability, or performance at different price points) - and move from one provider to another. Let's look at where standards are needed to make IaaS cloud computing a fungible resource.