Cloud infrastructures are complicated beasts, be it the machinery behind public clouds or the equipment big companies can buy to power their own private cloud. The large vendors are throwing their hats in the ring – but is all the technology ready? The odds are that no, the gaps are still wide open and the race is on.

I recently talked with a cloud architect at IBM, a really smart guy who presented his personal vision of the components of a cloud offering – see below (click for full size):

Let’s clarify what this architecture is for. Whether you’re a large enterprise consolidating your computing resources into a private cloud or a new player trying to compete against the likes of Amazon – this is what you need.

The interesting thing, especially for the startup community, is what’s missing. While much of the OSS layer is present, it’s the boxes in the BSS layer that are in practice sparsely populated. This casts light into the kinds of technologies that vendors like IBM might be shopping around for some day. These understandings can be applied not only regarding vendors, but also regarding the major cloud providers. Despite the fact that most if not all use their own proprietary technologies – they still need to fill in the same boxes.

So what’s missing?