# Cloud Computing

[If It’s in the Cloud, Get It on Paper: Cloud Computing Contract Issues](http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/IfItsintheCloudGetItonPaperClo/206532) by Thomas J. Trappler in Educause Quarterly. The article’s focus is on how to mitigate the risks of Cloud Computing through the contract terms with the cloud services provider.

If you’re looking for a cloud infrastructure on which to run self-written apps or on which to   
install cloud-amenable apps, there are certainly options to provide a   
cloud service locally. In fact, some of the best known approaches for doing so were   
UC-developed. Perceus [http://www.perceus.com](http://www.perceus.com) (spun out of <span class="caps">LBL</span>) is   
a provisioning system that can efficiently provision 1000’s of nodes   
for cloud-based operation. <span class="caps">ROCKS</span> (out of <span class="caps">SDSC</span>/<span class="caps">UCSD</span>)   
[http://www.rocksclusters.org/wordpress/](http://www.rocksclusters.org/wordpress/) is a similar technology.   
And Eucalyptus [http://www.eucalyptus.com/](http://www.eucalyptus.com/) (spun out of <span class="caps">UCSB</span>) is a   
cloud infrastructure very similar to Amazon’s <span class="caps">ECC</span>.

There was an earlier UC effort, the UC Cloud Computing Task Force. The group has finished its work, but its wiki space lives on: [https://spaces.ais.ucla.edu/x/pIVIAQ](https://spaces.ais.ucla.edu/x/pIVIAQ) . The final report is prominently linked from the home page.

*The text above was paraphrased from posts in August 2010 by Tom Trappler, Harry Mangalam and David Walker to [UC-<span class="caps">CSC</span> Mailing List](https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uccsc)*