The U.S. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has approved on Thursday the "The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing": a couple of pages (2 pages in number) that are worth reading. http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf My impression is that the definition is a bit more detailed and somewhat advanced than others, though obviously there are no new ideas. It is a reasonable snapshot of what we expect from CC, that will somewhat serve as a guideline future developments. It looks interesting to me the introduction of "rapid elasticity" and the explicit statement of "measured service" (see the OCCI document on SLA, currently in public comment). The deployment modes (private/hybrid/public and community) are also explicitly stated. Bye -- Augusto Ciuffoletti Dipartimento di Informatica Università di Pisa 56100 - Pisa (Italy)