Whenever two or three people in the cloud computing industry are gathered together, there will be five or seven definitions of 'cloud.' We see the cloud as IT infrastructure as a service. In practical terms, this tends to mean IT shops actively competing with Amazon EC2 for their organization's business, either so that IT directors can keep their jobs or, as is the case in the public sector, because regulatory issues preclude the public cloud. Where do we go from here?

Analysts can pontificate to their hearts’ content, but nothing can replace real-world experience. We invite some of our favourite practitioners to share what they have learned building and deploying clouds in the field.

Managed hosting claims cloud is the logical evolution of what they’ve been doing all along. IT shops beg to differ: they had to invent cloud because managed hosting didn’t know how to provide it. Two paradigms enter, one paradigm leaves!