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

[Sam Johnston <[e-mail]>]

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