At most large IT shops, plans are being made about how to take advantage of virtualization. The most common way to talk about this trend is to use the terms public cloud and private cloud, but it all comes down to changing the way IT builds systems to support the business. The change won’t be easy and will not happen nearly as fast as many vendors and analysts predict, but it will happen.
I have worked as a CTO in companies that were selling technology and in companies that were simply using technology. As a vendor, you are enthusiastic about your solution. As a consumer, you are eternally skeptical. When a bunch of vendors start using the same language at the same time, you have a trend. But rarely do the vendors mean the same thing. It is important to clear the decks in order to make a strong argument.
So, in today’s column, I present “Cloud Don’ts”: advice about what not to do when looking to use the cloud to improve the way your IT serves your business. The idea of “Cloud Don’ts” comes straight from the source of many good fashion ideas, Glamour magazine, which for years has published Glamour Don’ts to explain what not to wear.
Almost every explanation of the cloud these days uses the definition of cloud computing from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST’s definition clears up a lot of gray areas and sets the stage for three key questions:
- Can a private cloud ever beat the economics of the public cloud?
- When will the public cloud be sufficiently instrumented and manageable to support all of enterprise computing?
- How must the way IT applications are constructed change to make full use of the cloud?
Much of the current debate falls under the umbrella of these questions. Answering them is a tall order, something that I will tackle in future columns. Today we will explore three “cloud dont’s” , one related to each question, that prevent wasting time and money.
Don’t use a private cloud without a migration plan to the public cloud. A variety of vendors have bet the farm on the fact that clouds based on proprietary hardware, meaning anything more expensive than the cheapest commodity technology, will always be more expensive than the public cloud as built by Google and Amazon that relies on the cheapest components. Randy Bias, CEO of Cloud Scaling, and Jason Hoffman, Founder of Joyent, are both in this camp. They offer help in the form of consulting and software to build a public cloud-style infrastructure that can be used to offer a public cloud as a service or to run a private cloud.
