About the "cloud"

everywhere are talking about clouds private or public ... isn't "the cloud" just a fancy word for own hosting ?
what exactly makes a cloud and why it's called a cloud since we had this before ?

 

"Cloud" can have many meanings (that's why I'm having problems with the term myself). Here's a good overview: http://microreviews.org/types-of-cloud-computing/

 

thx for the link ... as i said just a fancy word for hosting nothing new in terms of technology
so the major aspect that makes a cloud is scalability since almost every service offered to the end user is virtualized/clustered with lots of backend storage space/devices

this what i'm thinking about "the cloud" (cloud computing)

 

Sometimes "cloud" just means online storage, and it doesn't have to be virtualized or distributed over multiple servers (see the ownCloud project). So you can never be sure what the other one means if he talks about the cloud. It's more of a marketing buzzword...

 

that's exactly right

 

I think the term cloud is abused by marketing but there are some aspects that I associate with the concept of the cloud.

A cloud environment is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consisting of many services available on Demand on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Flexibility, automation, scalability and smooth interactions within the whole infrastructure are characteristics of the services.

Look at Amazon AWS. AWS is a public cloud service:

S3 - Scalable File Storage - flexible: pay by usage (used storage + traffic) without upfront cost; scalability: no limitations on storage + traffic (files size limit at 5TB); smooth interaction: CDN support through CloudFront, storage for all backup features of other AWS services

EC2 - Virtual machines - flexible: pay by usage, instant creation and destruction of unlimited numbers of machines; scalability: several different templates; smooth interaction: easy extension of virtual block storage devices + snapshots to S3

Route53 - DNS - flexible: pay-per-zone; scalability: unlimited (softlimit 100) in a geo-distributed virtual DNS-system; smooth interaction: API

and many more but you get my point.

The term private cloud means that you create a IaaS within your own datacenter and provide these services to yourself/your departments.

Keep in mind: Cloud services are always controlled by APIs because of the virtual and distributed nature of the infrastructure.