Private cloud is ultimately a dead technology, whoever hosts it.
Private cloud delivers more hype than economic benefit.
Most of the barriers to adoption of public cloud are organisational, rather than technical.
These three points are the main conclusions of the arguments I make in the latest Flexiant whitepaper, “7 business reasons why moving Private Clouds to the Service Provider is a ‘no brainer’!“.
I recently posted a blog that highlighted an example of another disruptive technology similar to cloud, where the politics of the technology dictated what electronic current was adopted. The main source of resistance against public cloud, and the main advocate for private cloud is often the IT department. For them it’s a matter of self-preservation, rather than selection of the most appropriate cloud technology.
Service providers need to position their products against these arguments. To do this they need to articulate why their customers should adopt public cloud solutions, and not private cloud.
Download my whitepaper that challenges the widespread assumption that private cloud carries a number of advantages over public cloud. In it, I provide insight into the economic and organisational drivers of adoption of different cloud technologies, my view of the future prevalence of different types of cloud technology in IT purchasing budgets, and the corresponding impact upon service providers.
This whitepaper arms service providers with an in-depth view of the advantages and disadvantages of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions, helping them to reinforce the business advantages of their cloud solutions to their customers.
Hi Alex
Thanks for your interesting paper. While I do agree with you in most of you points in the paper. There is one important use of cloud technology where we at Praqma have found, that a private cloud (or virtualization) is an advantage over a public ditto.
And that is for software development teams.
I say so, because we have tried it. For some years we used virtualization through a pile of VMWare images we had on our external 2.5″ drives to represent our various development and testing environments. Early we embraced the world’s new technologies and started running these virtual machines on a refurbished blade centre running EXSi. When our SAN crashed it was very painful and it took us a whole day++ to come live again. We decided that we would put this environment in the hands of truly professionals and so we migrated to a public cloud.
Well the public cloud crashed as well, and there was literally nothing we could do except waiting for the professional staff at the cloud provider to bring their back-end and our virtual machines online again. It took more then 5 working days before we were back to normal. And our compensation was simply, that for the month where we’ed been without our environment for 25% of the time, we got a full refund. The actual loss we had while waiting was probably 15-30 larger than the compensation.
Today we’re back on self-hosted ESXi and KVM, we’re only running on cheap machines, and as you point out in your article yourself; we should expect then to fail some day – and we do. We keep copies of our images backed up, and if a machine fails we’ll just pull up another one instead and have that run our images instead. It can be done within hours – and that’s good enough.
At Praqma (DK) we have specialized in setting up software development tool stacks – and delivering them to our customers. And we have heard and seen all the poor arguments for not using a public cloud; regulatory rules and legislation are the most common we stumble into. And like you, we don’t buy ’em.
But the truth is, that when your need is a lot (as in ‘unlimited’) of different machines to support your software development and verification process; version control, review servers, Jenkins CI master and countless Jenkins CI slaves configured with different tools (and tool-licences) everything from compliers, style checkers, static code analysis tools, application servers, databases, test-setups with peripheral equipment etc. Then you actually do have an advantage of having these machines close to you – some times geographically close (due to the peripheral equipment – and accessible image backups) and sometimes just close in terms of low latency and Gigabit throughput.
We have delivered complete development setups to our customers in just one single rack-server running virtualization on top and everything else underneath.
“A complete software development and verification environment in a box”
One thing I really miss though – from my fling with the public cloud – is the top-nice web interface, the easy user and group administration and the easy accessible stats for internally billing between projects – Actually our cloud provider at the time was running Flexiant software, so that is a pad on the back for you – we miss you! 😉
I really believe that in the special case we and our customers represent; the way we use clouds and virtualization for version control, continuous integration, software development and verification, we would really benefit from having the the best of two worlds: Not a hybrid. But real, powerful cloud technology …on the inside.
Cheers
Lars Kruse
Partner and co-founder
Praqma – The Praqmatic Software Development Company
Hello, Interesting talks your website and WP sharing: “Private cloud is ultimately a dead technology”
Best regards & sorry my English mistakes.
We also think Data-centers will consolidate and future will see the servers disappearing from companies to shared data-centers… But this is not meaning customers will not build or use a “private cloud” for their own, as you mention already.
I think you are right about “Public Cloud” will go over “Private Cloud”, but because of the SaaS proposals explosion. As soon as customers will find easy and simple “Ready to use” Cloud solutions, they will turn away the heavy, less flexible “Corporate IT Cloud”. That’s the “Shadow IT” currently growing. But I am afraid lot of them are putting their data souls into; captive, not ethical, really not confidential (if hosted USA or France), cloud SaaS providers.
I am currently building an observatory from French part Switzerland perspective about Cloud Computing. To help my country citizen going to the Cloud using best practices, and avoiding traps.
I think we should relay part of your publications, all the same not in French
Hi Pascal,
Thank you for your thoughts and good luck with your project. Our Head of Solution Architecture lives in Geneva and may benefit directly from your project.
Thanks,
Joe Sherman
Digital Marketing Manager,
Flexiant