The cloud relationship model Wayne Horkan developed (replete with graphical representations) is the subject of his guest article on the Sun Startup Essentials site. Horkan's also has his own blog with other, related and unrelated, posts.

Horkan's model comprises three major cloud communities:

• Cloud Providers: building out Clouds, for instance Google, Amazon, etc.; Effective technology providers.

• Cloud Adopters / Developers: those developing services over the Cloud and some becoming the first generation of Cloud ISVs. He includes Cloud "Service" developers and Cloud ISV developers together. This group is effectively service enablers.

• Cloud "End" Users: those using Cloud provisioned services, often without knowing that they are cloud provisioned, the most obvious example of which are the multitude of Facebook users who have no idea their favorite FB app. is running on AWS. These are the service consumers.

Horkan also cites the five-part model from the 451 Group's white paper Partly Cloudy - Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing that identifies "as-a-service" variants as billing and engagement models and also postulates the five major Cloud Computing provider models, into which the majority of minor "*aaS" variants fall, which are:

• Managed Service Provision (MSP): not only are you hiring your service from the cloud, you've someone to run and maintain it too.

• Software as a Service (SaaS): pretty much ubiquitous as a term and usually typified by Salesforce.com, who are the SaaS poster child.

• Platform as a Service (PaaS): the application platform most commonly associated with Amazon Web Services.

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

• Hosting 2.0

Horkan also cites what he terms one of the best breakdowns and visual analysis of this space, the model in Peter Laird's Understanding the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS markets: a Map of the Players in the Industry and recommends it to readers.

Major Architectural Layers

Another element in Horkan's model includes the major architectural layers that are part of each of the above billing / engagement models offered by the Cloud providers. They are:

• Operations: this really is operations supporting functional business processes, rather than supporting the technology itself.

• Service layer: made up of application code, bespoke code, high-level ISV offerings.

• Platform layer: made up of standard platform software i.e. app. servers, DB servers, web servers, etc., and an example implementation would be a LAMP stack.

• Infrastructure layer: made up of infrastructure software (i.e. virtualization and OS software), the hardware platform and server infrastructure, and the storage platform.

• Network layer: made up of routers, firewalls, gateways, and other network technology.

With this structure laid out, Horkan assigns the parties to their respective places in the model: cloud providers, cloud users and, between them, inhabiting what he terms the "Delta of Effort / Delta of Opportunity," the cloud adopters/developers.

There are tradeoffs to be realized in this delta, Horkan writes, which vary in level of return depending on the greater or lesser contributions made by the the cloud provider, though cloud adopters/developers need to exercise care not to short the opportunity to benefit from the complete range of value offered in the cloud providers' infrastructure.

More Information

Cloud Computing Architecture Model Described

Wayne Horkan\'s blog

Sun Startup Essentials

Cloud Computing on the Sun HPC Community Portal

Sun\'s Cloud Offerings with Q-Layer Acquisition [...read more...]

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