There are fundamental differences between data centers and the Internet of Things, which means that fundamental Cloud architecture principles must also transform to support this new reality. This transformation promises to be truly disruptive — a true paradigm shift as we figure out what it means to implement what we call Cloud-Oriented Architecture.
Quick quiz for all your Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Give up? What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds typically consist of resources in data centers, running one way or another on racks full of physical servers. But there’s nothing in the definition of Cloud that specifies anything about the physical location of Cloud resources.

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