cloudlet

plural cloudlets

1. A little cloud.

   The shell-bursts from the Fascist anti-aircraft guns dotted the sky like cloudlets in a bad water-colour, but I never saw them get within a thousand yards of an aeroplane.

   1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter VI, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC

   5 more examples

   1872, Thomas Durfee, "El Paseo" in The Village Picnic and Other Poems, Providence, RI: George H. Whitney, p. 112, https://books.google.ca/books?id=pIEtAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false I gaze at the beautiful dames that go / In their open volantes up and down; / Bewitchingly floating, by threes and by twos, / In their gauzy cloudlets of silk and of lace, / That seem to have robbed the sky of its hues, / And seem to have robbed the swan of his grace.

   We drove briskly up the long, sleeping hill, and bowled down the hollow past the farms where the hens were walking with the red gold cocks in the orchard, and the ducks like white cloudlets under the aspen trees revelled in the pond.

   1911, D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, London: Heinemann, page 365

   The slide was shot back. A penitent emerged from the farther side of the box. The near slide was drawn. A penitent entered where the other penitent had come out. A soft whispering noise floated in vaporous cloudlets out of the box. It was the woman: soft whispering cloudlets, soft whispering vapour, whispering and vanishing.

   1916, James Joyce, chapter 3, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC

   At the world's edge began a strewing of roses, a shining and a blooming ineffably pure; baby cloudlets hung illumined, like attendant amoretti, in the blue and blushful haze […]

   1963, Thomas Mann, “Death in Venice”, in H. T. Lowe-Porter, transl., Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, New York: Vintage, page 49

   The water overflowed, creating a wide circle of soggy ground and marsh and shallow puddles above which, in the brilliance of the morning, there was a shimmer of butterflies and dense cloudlets of flies pulsing like veils.

   1968, Ivo Andrić, “Mustapha Magyar”, in Joseph Hitrec, transl., The Pasha's Concubine and Other Tales, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, page 93

   Synonyms: cloudling

2. computingA small-scale cloud data center deployed at the edge.

   The idea is to use the cloudlet as a flexible gateway or portal to access the distant cloud. The cloudlet can be implemented on PCs, workstations or low-cost servers.

   2017, Kai Hwang, Min Chen, Big-Data Analytics for Cloud, IoT and Cognitive Computing, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN