The 6 layers of the Cloud Computing Stack

From Sam Johnston's Taxonomy post

• Clients (examples) are computer hardware and/or computer software which rely on The Cloud for application delivery, or which is specifically designed for delivery of cloud services, and which are in either case essentially useless without it.
• Services (examples) (aka Web Service) are "software system[s] designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network"[36] which may be accessed by other cloud computing components, software (eg Software plus services) or end users directly.
• Application (examples) leverages The Cloud in software architecture, often eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer's own computer, thus alleviating the burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support.
• Platform (examples) (aka Platform as a service) (the delivery of a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service) facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers
• Storage (examples) is the delivery of data storage as a service (including database-like services), often billed on a utility computing basis (eg per gigabyte per month)
• Infrastructure (examples) (aka Infrastructure as a service) is the delivery of computer infrastructure (typically a platform virtualization environment) as a service