I recently attended a seminar put on by a consortium of
hardware vendors extolling the values of private cloud architecture. They were introduced by a reputable industry
analyst group that had done surveys of businesses in regards to their adoption
of private cloud technology. Not
surprisingly the analysts and the vendors talked about how many organizations
are looking to build a private cloud environment of their own. After listening to the pitch I thought it
would be a great opportunity to compare the two methodologies.
Just so I can lay all my cards on the table up front, I have
spent the last 15 years as a presales architect in in the business of hardware
sales. I have recently been working with
NTT America in the public cloud services arm so I think that I have a pretty good
look at both options. My personal opinion is that most technology will end up
in a public cloud (as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS).
Having said that however, I think there is room for discussion on the
subject.
For the most part the vendors that put on the webinar were
probably right about businesses taking their first cloud step with their own
private clouds. The reasons for this are
pretty obvious. Many organizations
already have at least a portion of the infrastructure in place and they many of
them have done a certain amount of virtualization so the next logical step for
the enterprises would seem to be making their current infrastructure into a
private cloud. There may also be so
political motives as well for maintaining the status quo and just extending the
existing infrastructure that they own.
Fear and Politics
- Jobs - People get nervous about jobs when they start thinking about their hardware going somewhere else. There is a whole group of people in most organizations that do the sys admin work and the cabling and racking and stacking. There is also a group that manages the physical infrastructure that would also be affected by a movement to a public cloud provider.
- Loss of control. For many years I have worked in data centers and there was nothing like the happiness that you felt from the brightly flashing lights and the sound of the spinning disks and the warmth that you felt from the back of the servers as you huddled behind them in a datacenter to try to stay warm. It was like a security blanket. If I sound like I am being sarcastic I am. Being inside of datacenters I a pain in the butt, but having it close by makes people feel better. They feel that if something were to go wrong they can run right into the datacenter and fix it.
For example I recently was working with a customer that was looking to create a virtual desktop environment. When we went through some of the basic sizing questions we found out that the environment would never scale beyond 50 to 100 users. If you design VDI solutions for full redundancy you are looking at typically a minimum of 3-5 servers and backend storage for redundancy. This was a small company and in my mind the numbers didn’t make sense to even bother building something out. When I suggested a more appropriate solution may be to look at a cloud offering for building a VDI environment the customer wouldn’t entertain the idea because of the control factor.
- Security - If it is behind my firewall then it is protected. If you go back to my staffing argument from above there are whole teams of security engineers that are making each corporations safer. They also have the fear of job displacement.
- Hardware vendors have less of an incentive to push public clouds because that makes the amount of people that they can sell to diminish. If all computing were to be consolidated to a handful of vendors then in essence the hardware teams that sell to SMB and other businesses would be out of work or would be chasing the big guys. So for in the most part it is not in their best interest to push a public cloud model.
So what keeps organizations in the safe place of creating a
private cloud is fear. Fear of losing
jobs, losing control, security breaches, etc.
I would submit that much of the fear is based on the newness of cloud
technologies and may not be completely warranted. Showing a survey that says that because
companies are looking to create a private cloud and that is reality may miss
the point. Asking the question of whether or not a customer is looking at
private clouds may be a leading question. The question should have been what the better
option for the customer is. But that is
hard to ask in a survey.
Public Clouds
Public Clouds offer the users and alternative to the traditional way of doing things. There are many advantages to creating a public cloud over building your own. However, based on some of my previous comments it may not seem like as an obvious choice for some organizations. For example if you have a datacenter that is already built out with lots of growth built into the design and you have done your best to consolidate your infrastructure the public clouds may seem more risky.
There are some factors that you do get from using a public
cloud that you wouldn’t get if you built your own
- Infrastructure - You no longer have to be concerned with managing and monitoring the infrastructure. So if a new series of servers comes out with different types of power supplies or requires more wattage it is no longer your problem. You also do not have to worry about maintaining the space from a facilities perspective. No diesel storage, no backup generation, no running of fiber into the building so you can have high speed connections. That is all taken care of by your vendor.
- Migrations - You now no longer need to worry about the cost of upgrading your environment. Every 3 years or so most organizations refresh their equipment. That means that there is a capital outlay every few years or so. And during that time frame you need to have a group of people that will manage the migrations.
- Jobs - It is true that the job qualifications will change for your organization. There will be less people that will be needed for maintaining the basic infrastructure. Those people could be redeployed in a way the provided higher value to your organization.
- Location independence – I highlighted in my Private cloud discussion the warmth I had for spending my day in the datacenter. Those days are a thing of the past. Remote access is expected and with the capabilities of spinning up new machines and creating fault tolerant environments in the cloud I think this argument is a moot one. There are additional security features that you are going to want to ensure within the environment so this is not completely a win for public clouds.
Public clouds do have their downsides as well.
- Virtualization type – If you have already invested in virtualization there may be some additional steps to getting your environment to the cloud. Some vendors base their solution off of different hypervisors that may mean that a conversion is needed.
- Ability to migrate in and out of the environment. It takes time and expertise to move to and between cloud vendors. As mentioned above their isn’t one standard for virtualization so it may take more effort to get there. It generally is easier to start from scratch.
- Storage options - You will be using whatever the vendor decided to by so if you don’t like what you have there aren’t any ways to change it.
- Security – While this fear may not be completely founded in reality sharing infrastructure with other companies make people nervous
I could go on with a list of 100 different reasons why you
would choose one technology over the other.
I personally think that in the next 20 years the ROI for Public Cloud
providers will be too compelling to build your own private cloud. And why would you want to deal with the
headache. Right public cloud has some
good uses and other places where infrastructure is in place it does not. So who wins the debate? For the moment being I am calling a jump
ball. There are use cases for both and each organization should evaluate their
own situation. 