In recent years, cloud computing has gotten everyone excited, and rightly so. After all, who does not like the scalable, elastic and near-instantaneous access to computing (and storage resources)? Today, we learn the formation of the Virtual Computing Environment, a joint partnership among VMware, Cisco & EMC.
With increasing complexity of cloud implementations, it becomes necessary to create an abstraction that hides the details of server CPUs, storage and the networking needed between them. Where would this abstraction live? Where else? In the cloud, public or private. The vBlock package definitions seem to offer a good start for this abstraction. Perhaps we can regard vBlock as Cloud-as-a-Service or CaaS, to accompany the three others - IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
