Cloud Provider Vs Cloud Enabler

[Winston Prakash]

May be a stupid question. Can somebody explain the difference between
Cloud Provider and Cloud Enabler?
I searched the web, but couldn't get any satisfactory results.

Thanks,
Winston

[Jake Kaldenbaugh]

Provider = hoster of cloud service
Enabler = technology for those that want to provide or consume clouds

[Reuven Cohen]

--~--~

I first came up with this provider / enabler distinction in April, shortly after we created this group. Below is an except from the original post.

Enablers - These are companies that enable the underlying infrastructures or the basic building blocks. These companies are typically focused on data center automation and or server virtualization (VMware/EMC,Citrix,BladeLogic, RedHat, Intel, Sun, IBM, Enomalism, etc) These enablers can range from the chip level such as intel VT, to the hypervisor such as xen or vmware to the orchestration such as 3tera or our Enomalism elastic computing platform.

Providers - (amazon web services, rackspace, Google, Microsoft). The ones with the budgets and know how to build out global computing environments costing millions or even billions of dollars. Cloud providers typically offer their infrastructure or platform. Frequently these "As a Service" offerings are are billed & consumed on a utility basis.

Consumers - On the other side of the spectrum I see the "consumers" companies that build or improve their web applications on top of existing clouds of computing capacity without the need to invest in data centers or any physical infrastructure. Often these two groups can be one in the same such as Amazon (SQS,SDB,etc), Google (Apps) and Salesforce (Force). But they can also be new startups that provide tools & services that sit on top of the cloud (Cloud management). Cloud consumers can be a fairly broad group including just about any application that is provided via a web based service like a webmail, blog, social network, etc. Cloud computing from the consumer point of view is becoming the only way you build, host and deploy a scalable web applications these days.

Original Post: http://elasticvapor.com/2008/04/what-is-cloud-computing.html
--
--

Reuven Cohen
Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly Inc.

blog > www.elasticvapor.com
-
Get Linked in> http://linkedin.com/pub/0/b72/7b4

[Khazret Sapenov]

I think Provider/Consumer might also be thought of as just operational states(modes).

 

Hybrid Mode is encountered, when Provider consumes resources from other Provider (e.g. Amazon EC2 temporarily switches to Nirvanix instead of S3 :) ), same applies to Consumer, that might provides its resources like processing capacity (e.g. Sony Playstation 3 or plain workstation participating in Folding@Home or SETI).

[Mathew]

Winston,

The only stupid question is one that isn't asked; but there are stupid
answers (I hope mine isn't one). So if I understand your question correctly
I would categorize "cloud providers" as an ISP or a BB provider with a gate
to the Inet; and the "cloud enabler" (as in cloud computing) I view as a
company that assists transitioning a traditional license model for SaaS
delivery.

Best,
Mathew

-----Original Message-----
From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Winston Prakash
Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 5:15 PM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Cloud Provider Vs Cloud Enabler

Thanks,
Winston

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6:43 AM

[timothy norman huber]

What is considered a big memory footprint per core for cloud applications?  

Regards,

Timothy

Timothy Huber

Strategic Account Development

tim....@metaram.com

cell 310 795.6599

MetaRAM Inc.

181 Metro Drive, Suite 400 

San Jose, CA 95110 

http://www.linkedin.com/in/timhuber

[Nati Shalom]

Mathew

I would agree with your definition.
I would also add another category - "Cloud Wannabe" for those who want to be
cloud enabled and offer their product in SaaS model as part of their future
roadmap but are not necessarily going to actually run on a public cloud in
the near future. They may also need to continue to maintain their existing
business (in a non SaaS model) in parallel to their new SaaS business.
In most cases they would like to do that without developing two separate
product lines. This is where cloud-enabler can play another role i.e.
providing an abstraction layer between the application and the underlying
deployment environment.

Nati S
GigaSpaces (cloud enabler)

[Reuven Cohen]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 7:38 PM, Nati Shalom <natis...@gmail.com> wrote:

Mathew

I would agree with your definition.
I would also add another category - "Cloud Wannabe" for those who want to be
cloud enabled and offer their product in SaaS model as part of their future
roadmap but are not necessarily going to actually run on a public cloud in
the near future. They may also need to continue to maintain their existing
business (in a non SaaS model) in parallel to their new SaaS business.
In most cases they would like to do that without developing two separate
product lines. This is where cloud-enabler can play another role i.e.
providing an abstraction layer between the application and the underlying
deployment environment.

Nati S
GigaSpaces (cloud enabler)

 
Cloud Wannabe is a great definition for a lot of companies that also slap a cloud logo on their exisiting product set and maybe add a color or something.

reuven

[Ray Nugent]

Here's a great example -

http://seekingalpha.com/article/90945-intuit-how-to-improve-cloud-computing-safety