Peter Mell coauthored The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing by Peter Mell and Timothy Grance in 2011. The publication identifies on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service as essential characteristics.[ref]
The classification separates what service a consumer controls from how it is deployed. Infrastructure, platform and software services expose different management boundaries, while public, private, community and hybrid deployments describe organizational arrangements. A service can therefore be publicly accessible without giving its consumers control of the underlying operating systems.
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