Cloud computing has been endorsed by the IT community as the new paradigm shift in the industry that charts the way forward. Unfortunately, the field is still on its path to rigor and robustness. This is epitomized by the numerous fuzzy articulations of “what is cloud computing”. This paper makes a first attempt at remedying this conundrum by providing a core technical specification of the model for cloud computing and demonstrating how current and future cloud deployments can use this to foster more productive technical discussion in future.