Summary
According to Lewis Carroll, the fictional Humpty Dumpty said “When I use a word. . .it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”7 We could define “cloud” to mean anything, but defining it as a common, location-independent, online, utility, on-demand service enables us to explore the economic properties of clouds in the coming chapters.
The cloud concept draws from many precursors in distributed computing, utility services, hosting and colocation, and even the mainframe era yet differs from them each in certain respects. The definition that we are using, moreover, is domain independent and applies to taxi services, hotel chains, electric utilities, and others. Therefore, much of the analysis in the rest of the book applies not only to cloud computing but to these other domains as well.
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