The cloud's demographics

In trying to navigate through the maze of the several definition's that are available, it is clear that there are various ways in which we can take a look at clouds, however, we will focus on the main ones and simplify them for our understanding. 

As a first step, let us define what could pass as cloud computing. The Wikipedia definition is as follows:

If we look at that statement from a technical standpoint, it would be fair to say that in order for something to be referred to as cloud computing, it must at least possess the following characteristics:

• Self-service (reduces wait time to get resources provisioned)
• Shared, standard, consistent (shared pools of configurable resources)
• Cross-domain automation (rapid provisioning) 
• Consumption based chargeback and billing 

The three main ways in which we can take a look at dissecting the clouds are as follows:

• Based on abstraction 
• Based on the services offered 
• Based on the consumers of the services