It seems that not a day goes by without another cloud-related update in the hosting industry. While there is general consensus within the industry on the taxonomy of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), and there is some public market sizing/forecasting on cloud services by the good folks at IDC, I have not seen much discussion on the key components of enabling a cloud service.
To that end, I have put together the following illustration to represent my point of view. Below the dotted line is the physical layer and above the line is the virtual layer (pun intended), or more specifically the cloud software layer. I see four critical software components needed to enable a cloud service: virtualization, provisioning/automation, billing, and self-service.
What do you think?
