The concept of Cloud is yet still unclear to many people I work with, we are in 2013 now and the hype of the cloud is everywhere already. However, I still find myself in discussions about the differences of between cloud, Automation, virtualization..etc
I want to briefly define each of that in points the way I see it
Cloud
- The final product of both virtualization and automation
- Pay as you go, or pay as you use model
- lines items, services are categorized through service catalogue
- Hardware Agnostic and that a key differentiator from Automation/virtualization
- The cloud is the whole ecosystem and the final product of all orchestrated services, inelegance or HW behind it
Automation
The methodology of auto management of resources (HW/SW) in response to business changes
Virtualization
The layer where all HW is considered as one layer for multiple OS instances allocation controlled by what is called HyperVisor
