"The Cloud" vs. "A Cloud" vs. "Intra-Cloud"

There is a great deal of confusion about Cloud Computing. Let's shed some light on what's out there, what's new, and what is possible now that was never even conceivable before Cloud Computing.

First, we have "The Cloud" aka The World Wide Web aka The Internet. The idea here is simple and dates back to 1996: Some day, everyone will have such a fast internet connection, that they no longer need to store files on their local system. They can store everything, do everything online, leveraging servers. Someone else takes care of backups, software updates, etc. One of the first attempts at this was the Network Computer from Oracle. Ironic that Oracle's Larry Ellison is one of the biggest cloud computing bashers. CherryPal, founded in 2007 a decade later, does basically the same thing - leverages "The Cloud."

Next, we have "A Cloud" - and Amazon is the clear innovator here. The key differentiation between "A Cloud" and "The Cloud" is that unlike the Internet Cloud, Amazon controls EVERYTHING about "The Amazon Cloud." This means that within this one specific cloud, developers can expect a certain level of reliability, performance, latency, redundancy, security, etc. One startup that validates the importance of this "intra-cloud computing" is Arista Networks, which focuses on selling network hardware to companies like Amazon to improve their "intra-cloud" performance, latency, scalability, and reliability.

In the "A Cloud" category, we've had several MEGA players making big announcements about their multi-billion dollar investments: Sun, IBM, HP/Intel, Yahoo, Google, AT&T . What is clear is that each of these clouds will seek ways to differentiate to compete with each other (all chasing Amazon right now), to persuade new software engineering projects to begin their efforts on their cloud. They will seek to make their respective intra-cloud "Eco-systems" superior in terms of features and functionality, but also in terms of network performance, latency, reliability, bandwidth, etc.

So as a builder of "A Cloud," where would you focus first? Clearly the first focus should be on the network, the computing, flexibility, security - in a word, infrastructure. However, clearly there are services that would also make their eco-system compelling in terms of completeness. Amazon once again is the example here: Their Simple Storage Service (S3) and Simple Queue Service (SQS) are key factors to their success and leadership, in addition to the infrastructure of the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

Therefore, there is a window of opportunity for "Intra-Cloud Service Providers", companies which provide "piped" services like SQS, perhaps leveraging the "A Cloud"'s infrastructure to reliably and elastically deliver these metered services.