Re: [clouds] A cloud ref. framework for your review and comments

[Paul Unbehagen <[e-mail]>]

Hey Sam,

I agree that the market will work it out and is already moving in this direction or else we wouldn't be having these discussions. I also agree with Bob that there are different semantics for private. 

I think most who attend a cloud bof also get the analogy to the public electric grid as a similar model for cost savings for IT, but in that analogy not every source of electric power is always from the public grid and for that matter where it is from a utility it's not the same public utility provider in different places or applications.  Which means as time goes on there will be several public and private cloud models.  So, it's not so much the tail wagging the dog as it's two different dogs that share a lot in common.   

Let's also be sure not to become too myopic and forget that not everyone will connect to a giant public cloud. There are and will be more private clouds in the market. As there is more to the decision of using the cloud than just economic such as legal, security, and proximity.

--
Paul


On Aug 2, 2010, at 12:24 AM, Sam Johnston <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 2 August 2010 01:25, Natale, Bob <[e-mail]> wrote:
> In the general case, I don't think it is accurate to say that [all] private clouds lack multi-tenancy – it's just that their tenant base is restricted relative to that of public clouds.  The tenant base for a private cloud might be multiple departments, divisions, or even multiple distinct corporations (all members of the same conglomerate, for example).  In some cases, those tenant bases will have legal, cultural, or logistical grounds that equate effective independence in this context.
> 
> However you look at it you are significantly limiting the benefit of cloud by limiting the size of the pool as you still have to engineer for peak loads and carry 100% of the costs yourself, wasting valuable resources on maintaining IT rather than applying it to business problems (the latter being a differentiator, the former a handicap). This may be an improvement over today's wasteful approach to IT but it's incremental and only applies to the largest of enterprises and even then only those who implement top down - many cloud pilots are departmental and therefore little more than the evolution of virtualisation.
> 
> The question often comes up as to whether Amazon EC2 is a "private cloud" from Amazon's point of view, but this is bogus as they do share the capex, ops, etc. with many untrusted third parties. As such "community cloud" (where a number of different organisations form a community to share infrastructure) is a better emulation of "true" cloud computing than "private cloud", but the benefits are still limited compared to a massive multi-tenant infrastructure like that of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
> 
> Anyway this argument is ongoing, unlikely to be resolved here (though the market will work it out quickly enough) and tangential to the issue of standards.
> 
> Sam
>