On the Varieties of Clouds for Data Intensive Computing

By a cloud we mean an infrastructure that provides resources or services over a network, often the Internet, usually at the scale and with the reliability of a data center. We distinguish between clouds that provide on-demand computing instances (such as Amazon’s EC2 service) and clouds that provide on-demand computing capacity (such as provided by Hadoop). We give a quick overview of clouds and then describe some open source clouds that provide on-demand computing capacity. We conclude with some research questions.