Here's a question that's given me a lot of trouble. I have Joyent, a company that is largely based on Open Solaris, claiming to be a Cloud Provider.

Here's the problem: Joyent does not provide an API. Or if they do, I can't find it.

Joyent has a list up that talks about what they think makes up a cloud provider:

1. Virtualization Layer Network Stability
2. API for Creation, Deletion, Cloning of Instances
3. Application Layer Interoperability
4. State Layer Interoperability
5. Application Services (e.g. email infrastructure, payments infrastructure)
6. Automatic Scale (deploy and forget about it)
7. Hardware Load Balancing
8. Storage as a Service
9. “Root”, If Required

This is an inane list, and clear propoganda for Joyent's Solaris-based solutions, and it's working. Many of the larger clients I'm talking to on a regular basis are talking to me about 'Joyent's Cloud.' I only have one problem with this: they don't have one.

At core, Cloud Computing is about providing easily accessible resources via APIs - that's really what separates a cloud from a 'utility service' of any other sort: the fact is it's not a Cloud if it's not programatic.

I recently gave a keynote with Kieran Lal of Acquia at DrupalCamp LA. In my keynote, which was about the changing ecosystem around the Drupal CMS, I touched on definitions for cloud computing. I won't bore you with those yet (I'll do it a little further down). The key take away from it is this: "We thought that virtualization would unlock consolidation. It turns out the real value of virtualization is being able to provide datacenters as a service."

But it's not virtualization itself that creates cloud computing: that's what marketing people want you to believe. What creates cloud computing is binding technologies (XMPP, XML) and APIs (SOAP and REST) working together to "free" all of the resources of the datacenter into pools of resources that can be sold "on demand" and managed.