Comment A few weeks ago I attended the Italian VMUG user conference. One of the most interesting sessions at the event was “Strategic Private Cloud”, presented by Alan Civita of Sky UK, who confirmed what is now a common trend in very large IT organisations: a strategy based on two different private clouds.
Cloud is a synonym for operational agility and efficiency. Many IT organisations have been migrating to the cloud for a while now and, at the beginning, the public cloud seemed to be the cure for all ills (with AWS and Microsoft being the providers of choice).
Well, this was true until the bills started coming in, which was when many discovered that costs can quickly become unsustainable.
As someone told me a few days ago, “doing only public cloud is like living at the Four Seasons” and I couldn’t agree more. Private and hybrid clouds are not to be seen as a step back; on the contrary, they are actually becoming more and more popular because, when it comes to large organisations, they have the right balance between cost, efficiency and flexibility.
Why two (or more) clouds?
The IT problem is always the same, heading towards the future while managing the legacy. In this case, the legacy is virtualisation or, more commonly, VMware-based infrastructures. On the other hand, the future is an AWS-like cloud for new applications designed to take advantage of its characteristics, and OpenStack is the basic component that can help to realize this vision.
A VMware-based cloud is fundamental to all traditional enterprise needs, applications and workloads. Usually, it is just an IaaS but because of its status of “enterprise cloud”, everything is supported and managed end-to-end. This means that any resource part of it has a first-class status and end users are real end users who expect performance, stability, availability, consistency, backups and so on. They want it, and they don’t care how it’s done.
Furthermore, in some cases, and back to the point of “everything is managed end-to-end,” users go through traditional provisioning processes and don’t see any cloud aspect at all. The cloud part of this infrastructure is seen only by the ops team, and even then as an evolution of the legacy infrastructure they’ve always managed.
Read More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/21/private_clouds_strategy_and_tactics/
Cloud is a synonym for operational agility and efficiency. Many IT organisations have been migrating to the cloud for a while now and, at the beginning, the public cloud seemed to be the cure for all ills (with AWS and Microsoft being the providers of choice).
Well, this was true until the bills started coming in, which was when many discovered that costs can quickly become unsustainable.
As someone told me a few days ago, “doing only public cloud is like living at the Four Seasons” and I couldn’t agree more. Private and hybrid clouds are not to be seen as a step back; on the contrary, they are actually becoming more and more popular because, when it comes to large organisations, they have the right balance between cost, efficiency and flexibility.
Why two (or more) clouds?
The IT problem is always the same, heading towards the future while managing the legacy. In this case, the legacy is virtualisation or, more commonly, VMware-based infrastructures. On the other hand, the future is an AWS-like cloud for new applications designed to take advantage of its characteristics, and OpenStack is the basic component that can help to realize this vision.
A VMware-based cloud is fundamental to all traditional enterprise needs, applications and workloads. Usually, it is just an IaaS but because of its status of “enterprise cloud”, everything is supported and managed end-to-end. This means that any resource part of it has a first-class status and end users are real end users who expect performance, stability, availability, consistency, backups and so on. They want it, and they don’t care how it’s done.
Furthermore, in some cases, and back to the point of “everything is managed end-to-end,” users go through traditional provisioning processes and don’t see any cloud aspect at all. The cloud part of this infrastructure is seen only by the ops team, and even then as an evolution of the legacy infrastructure they’ve always managed.
Read More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/21/private_clouds_strategy_and_tactics/
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