We've been talking about Infrastructure providers for quite a bit already. OpenStack itself started as such an IaaS and then it quickly became a cloud provider. But what does that mean? What is a cloud provider suppose to provide? What's cloud after all?

Scaling a distributed system goes beyond virtualization, shared storage etc. In order to support on-demand scaling it is necessary to have an easy way to provision and consume the available infrastructure, a way for the services running in it to communicate, etc. Not to mention latency needs, reliability, etc.

This talk aims to answer the above questions and take a step further down the path of explaining what should be considered essential for nowadays needs, especially when those needs require a cloud to be covered.