The cloud computing taxonomy was initially developed by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a tool for standardizing conversations around cloud architectures. Since then, this basic model has been enhanced by the community and broadly adopted to discuss basic concepts. The major taxonomy components are described here:
The service consumer is the entity (enterprise or end user) that actually uses the cloud service. Users will normally have multiple programming interfaces. These interfaces present themselves like any normal application and the user does not need to understand any cloud computing platform details. User interfaces can also provide administrative functions like virtual machine or storage management.
The cloud service provider (CSP) creates, manages, and delivers information technology services to the...