The Cloud Computing Mind Map

George Reese, author and founder of Valtira and enStratus has had several books published with O’Reilly Media, the latest being Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud.  He’s also put together the best mind map of the Cloud Computing I’ve seen. I’ve linked the image to the O’Reilly site for easy of navigation.

It’s an excellent overview of how vendors delivering Cloud operating systems, storage, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Configuration Management are organized.  The overview of Cloud Computing benefits, barriers and characteristics is also excellent, as is the project-based definitions, Cloud stack, types of clouds and deployment models.   Be sure to check out his post on the O’Reilly blog for a full discussion of the mind map and his thoughts on putting it together.