“The cloud” for dummies: A casual chat with Rackspace

Rackspace CTO John Engates knows the cloud — it’s kind of his bread and butter.

In this interview, we sat down with the cloudmeister, as we like to call him, and picked apart the definition of cloud technology.

After all, isn’t “cloud” just another word for the Internet? Engates says that’s what many companies would like for consumers to believe, but the actual definition of cloud computing is a bit more complicated.

Engates also name-checks some “cloud-washing” offenders in this clip and explains why developers aren’t too easily hoodwinked by their trickery.

If you’d like an in-depth, textual look at the difference between IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and SaaS (software-as-a-service), you should check out our own Sean Ludwig’s feature on cloud computing terms you need to know.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!