Robert Dempsey has an excellent talk up on Confreaks where he looks at the Ruby language accessing Cloud computing.  As Robert knows, Standard Operating Procedure for a high level talk is to define the terms for the audience.  For this group the term ‘Ruby’ was a given, so he wisely focused on the Cloud.  Lemme recap what he lists as NOT being a Cloud if…

• You cannot buy it with your personal credit card
• They are trying to sell you hardware
• There is no API
• You need to rearchitect your system for it
• it takes more than 10 minutes to provision
• you need to specify the number of machines you want up front
• you own all the hardware

This, in my opinion, is an excellent primer for evaluating that ‘Try our new Cloud Computing Service’ pitch your VAR is feeding you.  I can only add one point of my own, as in my mind it is not Cloud Computing if…

• The the business model hinges on lock-in

Value Added Networks (VANs) can have a cloud-like smell to them when they branch beyond simple traffic passing and on into backend processing, but I have difficulty reconciling the lock-in potential.  If you cannot shift your system to a new Cloud provider easily, then I believe you are dealing with an entirely different animal.  Buyer Be Ware.