Work

Describing the Elephant: The Different Faces of IT as Service

Year: 2005

Type: article

Abstract: In a well-known fable, a group of blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each encounters a different part of the animal and, not surprisingly, provides a different description. We see a similar degree of confusion in the IT industry today, as terms such as service-oriented architecture, grid, utility computing, on-demand, adaptive enterprise, data center automation, and virtualization are bandied about. As when listening to the blind men, it can be difficult to know what reality lies behind the words, whether and how the different pieces fit together, and what we should be doing about the animal(s) that are being described. (Of course, in the case of the blind men, we did not also have marketing departments in the mix!)

Source: Queue

DOI: 10.1145/1080862.1080874

Authors: Ian Foster, Steven Tuecke

Institutions: Argonne National Laboratory, University of Chicago, University of the Valley of Atemajac, Universitas Al Washliyah

Language: English

Topic: Cloud Computing and Resource Management

Subfield: Information Systems

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, Advanced Scientific Computing Research

Awards: G2123841078, G3892653051