"I am the great and powerful Amazon, maker of the public cloud and provider of books and diapers. I brought you out of the land of physical infrastructure, rescuing you from the bondage of Pharaoh IT's data center. I hereby set forth these commandments to allow my people to judge the idols who compete for their attention.
These are my commandments for the cloud:
- Thou shalt offer on-demand compute resources with support for different configurations, including processing power, memory and I/O.
- Thou shalt provide support for multiple operating systems, including those provided by the angel Torvalds and the arch-angel Gates.
- Thou shalt offer the ability to attach storage of varying sizes to compute resources, providing high performance with medium durability.
- Thou shalt offer a long term storage with high durability and less performance, which can be used independent of compute resources. I will forgive idols who cannot provide my heavenly 11 9’s of durability.
- Thou shalt offer support for application services, including load balancing, database, and queues.
- Thou shalt offer these services in multiple regions across many lands.
- Thou shalt offer these services with consumption-based pricing, so my people pay only for what they use.
- Thou shalt offer multiple means to provision and manage this infrastructure, including the web, command line, and API.
- Thou shalt offer support for provisioning infrastructure in a private area of the cloud, so the meek of my flock can support their special security needs.
- Thou shalt not offer an on-premise cloud managed by Satan, maker of all IT data centers, who wishes only to offer you false riches to steal your soul.
Competing idols who do not follow these commandments, shall not consider themselves a cloud.
These are the words of the great and powerful Amazon, maker of the cloud."
Check out Business Week’s article, The Cloud: Battle of the Tech Titans, for a good read on the battle for the cloud.