I think one important distinction of cloud vs. outsourcing is the ephemeral nature of the resources in cloud computing. I.E. the ability to start from zero, provision compute and storage resources of some type (either manually or automatically in response to changing conditions) and then deprovision them similarly after using the resources for perhaps mere minutes or hours. The cost is determined by what you used for the duration you used it, typically billed to an interval of minutes or sometimes even seconds. And since it has on-ramp starting at zero infrastructure and zero cost, you can easily try out ideas at a cost of something you can put on a credit card. Infrastructure is charged in increments of pennies. And if it doesn't work out, you turn it off and your charges stop.*
Last I knew, and I would like to be proven wrong, zCloud didn't embody the idea of "I want to play with z/OS for a few hours, stand up a z/OS image with x CPU and y GB of disk and put it on my credit card". *-Remember: in the cloud, you pay for what you forgot to turn off. And those pennies can add up shockingly fast in some cases! Scott Chapman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
