“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.

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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.

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