If you need more RAM, and you have to call your service provider, they’ve got to order the RAM, wait until they receive it, and then put it in a physical server, before you actually get more memory, and then they bill you on a one-off basis for buying and installing the RAM, you’re not doing cloud computing. If you have to negotiate the price of that RAM each time they buy some, you are really really not doing cloud computing.

I talked to a client yesterday who is in exactly this situation, with a small vendor who calls themselves a cloud computing provider. (I am not going to name names on my blog, in this case.)

Cloud infrastructure services should not be full of one-offs. (The example I cited is merely the worst of the service provider’s offenses against cloud concepts.) It’s reasonably to hybridize cloud solutions with non-cloud solutions, but for basic things — compute cores, RAM, storage, bandwidth — if it’s not on-demand, seamless, and nigh-instant, it’s not cloud, at least not in any reasonable definition of public cloud computing. (“Private cloud”, in the sense of in-house, virtualized data centers, adopts some but not all traits of the public cloud to varying degrees, and therefore gets cut more slack.)

Cloud infrastructure should be a fabric, not individual VMs that are tied to specific physical servers.