Rational Survivability

It’s 10:13pm on a Friday night and as the highlight of my day begrudgingly reveals itself, I discover in preparation for the inevitable appearance of tomorrow, that I am once again out of clean underwear.

There are many potential remedies for this situation.

Option number one suggests I could borrow a pair of my wife’s low-cuts.  She’s out of town and would never know, except perhaps discovering upon her return the horribly awkward and uncomfortable remnants of chafing in places we simply and politely just don’t talk about at parties.

Option number two involves what I call ‘The Braveheart.” Commando fashionista. Rivets on Levis put a quick end to that potential.

Option number three. CVS. It’s open 24 hours. They sell boxers. I saw them last week when I ran out of toothpaste in a similarly-themed domestic challenge. However, it’s now 10:16pm and whilst the pharmacy is only 10 minutes away, I’d prefer not to have to explain or even acknowledge to the cashier — silently with a sheepish grin and a telling nod — why it is I am buying underwear instead of beer at 10pm on a Friday night.

Option number four. The uncomfortable reconciliation of fact.  Laundry.

Laundry is not an altogether alien concept to me.

In a house where I am surrounded by a fortress of estrogen-themed daily drama, couture — or namely the availability of fresh sources of same, not found strewn around the house in piles resembling Inuit housing — is a constant and simultaneous source of both amusement and utter distress.

I know how it works.  More specifically I know how it *should* work. It’s not that difficult a concept to master.

I contemplate, strangely, what it would be like if option number four required something other than a modest jaunt to the basement where lives the ominous apparatus that does diligent battle with the detritus threatening the sanctity of my linens.

I reckon back to the days of college and of single life in an apartment where this capability was not installed, where I had to pack up my dirty vestments, remember the detergent, fabric softener, dryer sheets and a thousand dollars in quarters and trek to…

The laundromat.

I re-imagine the hours I’ve spent there.

Strangely-timed appearances meant to avoid the rush which is met with the soul-crushing realization that everyone else uses the same random number generator to decide when to show.  The ludicrous rituals of basket placement and folding table land-wars.  The hope that at some point in the next 12 hours, the illusion of infinite laundry scale will avail itself to me.

I remember these things.

I remember the rust-stained linoleum flooring. Faded pictures and warning emblems threatening sure and certain death from things like asphyxiation, electrocution, strangulation and loss of appendages.  I am particularly disturbed and most concerned with the latter.

The community bulletin board is always a symbolic mecca for the cultural awesomesauce around which a neighborhood is formed; an eclectic mix of lost pets, waterbed auctions, spanish and math tutoring services, guitar or tuba lessons (your choice) and a never-ending supply of for-sale-by-owner-1984-in-good-condition-runs-perfectly-Honda Civics.

And yoga lessons.

Because with a wash-rinse-dry-fold cycle time of approximately 2 hours, down dog and vinyasas are a natural way to pass the time.  I must admit to never having witnessed yoga in a laundromat. Unless you consider two newlyweds making out in the corner as Yoga.

I recall the sweet and confusingly intoxicating smell of Downy.  That earthy, hot, suffocating perfumed humidity of 1000 dryers tumbling in a rhytmic chant of anti-moistness. Low frequency undulating serenity drummed into my consciousness, starkly punctuated with the the alarming and syncopated rupture of tempo by unrecovered pocket change falling out of jeans, producing a staccato “pitta-chank, pitta-chank, clink, donk.”

And then, the fear.  The fear that I don’t have enough quarters and that the change machine doesn’t take ten dollar bills and that I’ve forgotten to bring something to read, nourishment, hydration, motivation…

I recollect the homeless man curled up in the corner under the flickering TV that only gets Korean soap operas with a vertical lock problem and the industrial-sized machines used for washing tents, small couches or horse blankets.  There’s the cigarette, whiskey and cruely time-stained woman in 50 cent curlers in her high-fashion and Heathcliff slippers, unshaven legs and a hawaiian print moomoo reading People magazine, snickering at the misfortunes of multi-millionaire actresses jilted by their spoiled no-talent actor suitors.  Venom.

But most fondly I smile — almost vindictively — at the memory of the man staring hopelessly at the bank of identical washers, each in spin cycle, wondering which three were his and hopelessly wondering why it is that he is mesmerized and distracted then by the one pink sock in a load of all black washing, flitting back and forth through the porthole in the jumbo drier.

It’s then that  I flash forward to the now, staring at the highly advanced, extremely efficient and 100% available and dedicated GE Monogram front-loading washer and dryer standing before me in my basement.  They’re color matched in a silver hue not unlike that of a fighter jet — beautiful, sexy and — if you paid attention to the warnings in the laundromat — potentially deadly.

Speaking of which, I’m quite sure it *is* possible to drown in a front-loader, but the process eludes me.  Perhaps out of respect for the grieving family of anyone stupid enough who has managed to kill his or herself in a running washing machine. Perhaps because I’m thinking way too much about how this can be done.

The physical attractiveness is not the most compelling element of my dirt-ridding-appliances. It’s the fact that they belong to me.

Mine.

Now.

Forever.

No waiting.

No vehicular excursions. No lady in a moomoo. No territorial battles waged over timing issues between washing machine to dryer transfer latency.

All. Mine.

You see, although I recognize the idealistic beauty and utility of the laundromat, it’s beaten down and mocked selfishly by the bully that is the convenience of dedicated capacity.

The convenience of discretionary load times. The availability of highly-customized wash/dry settings.  Knowing that I didn’t just put my clothes in a vessel that rid unmentionables from someone’s love-stained sheets.

No nickel-and-diming me for quarters because the spin cycle was too short or where I end up paying twice as much for the utility of centralized community resources that do only 80% of what I need in drying cycles because my heavy thread-count towels are just too damned thick.  Nobody else gets to mistakenly touch my loads or scowl at me because I wasn’t neurotically hawking over the dwell times and exfiltrating things the microsecond a cycle was complete.

It is true, however, that I had to pay for the privilege of doing my laundry when and however I see fit and yes, frankly, sometimes the demand for use outstrips the supply, but ultimately, unless it’s comforter day, I can just plan better to make better use of what I have available to me.  Or I’ll make use of the industrial sized washers for my comforters in well-planned, more reasonably strategic washing sessions for when I need that scale, bulk or don’t really need a delicate cycle.

I can’t tell you what it *actually* costs per load of laundry in my basement. I admit I’ve long written off the books the initial investment of purchase. It seems less than what it costs per load to visit the laundromat.  Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking or perhaps it’s worth every penny not to have to share folding space with a man who reeks of kielbasa and Marlboro lights.  That’s not to say I don’t find him amusing in a cinema-verite sort of way.

Nor do I write off the efficiency and service this place provides.  It’s just that it doesn’t provide all things to all people and that’s OK.  The point is, those that need or like this place come here but you don’t hear them espousing that the only one true way to do laundry is at the laundromat, nor do they speak of the “laundromat revolution” whilst sipping hot chocolate or gatorade and finger-snap clapping to the pretentious preaching of bitter launderers.

It just is and I’m cool with that.  Just like my washing own washer and dryer is.  This simply isn’t about religion, righteousness, idealogs or dogma. It’s about getting my underwear clean.

I visit the laundromat still.  Because it’s useful to me.  Because it offers utility for things that are important to me.  But not because of some idealistic need to share space with others or make someone else money.  Afterall, utility is about choice.  There’s no right or wrong if a solution meets my needs.

So my underwear is washed and prior to drying it — at my leisure — I have managed to consume a snack in between watching something on Netflix, playing with my dog and — surprisingly — contemplating those guitar lessons.  I can’t say I miss the lady in curlers, but the dead potted plant that exists in both realities — my house and the laundromat — offers some comfort through familiarity.

Do I feel guilty for the inefficient hoarding of resources in my basement and not suggesting to my neighbor that they abandon their machines or pool them with mine to produce a kibbutz-like washing utility for the neighborhood at large?

No.

However, I would consider having a folding party if that makes you feel any better.

Utility is in how you use things, not necessarily how it’s offered.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

While I think Nick Carr’s power generation utility analogy was a fantastic discussion catalyst for the usefulness of a utility model, it is abused to extremes and constrains what might ordinarily be more open-minded debate on the present and future of computing.

This is a debate that continues to rise every few days on Twitter and the Blogosphere, fueled mostly by what can only be described from either side of the argument as a mixture of ideology, dogma, passionate opinion, misunderstood perspective and a squinty-eyed mistrust of agendas.

It’s all a bit silly, really, as both Public and Private Cloud have their place; when, for how long and for whom is really at the heart of the issue.

The notion that the only way “true” benefits can be realized from Cloud Computing are from massively-scaled public utilities and that Private Clouds (your definition will likely differ) are simply a way of IT making excuses for the past while trying to hold on to the present, simply limits the conversation and causes friction rather than reduces it.  I believe that a hybrid model will prevail, as it always has.  There are many reasons for this. I’ve talked about them a lot.

This got me thinking about why and here’s my goofy thought for consideration of the “value” and “utility” of Private Cloud:

If the power utility “grid” represents Public Cloud, then perhaps batteries are a reasonable equivalent for Private Cloud.

I’m not going to explain this analogy in full yet, but wonder if it makes any sense to you.  I’d enjoy your thoughts on what you think I’m referring to. 😉

/Hoff

Werner Vogels brought a smile to my face today with his blog titled “Seamlessly Extending the Data Center – Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.”  In short:

We have developed Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to allow our customers to seamlessly extend their IT infrastructure into the cloud while maintaining the levels of isolation required for their enterprise management tools to do their work.

In one fell swoop, AWS has:

• Legitimized Private Cloud as a reasonable, needed, and prudent step toward Cloud adoption for enterprises,
• Substantiated the value proposition of Private Cloud as a way of removing a barrier to Cloud entry for enterprises, and
• Validated the ultimate vision toward hybrid Clouds and Inter-Cloud

They made this announcement from the vantage point of operating as a Public Cloud provider — in many cases THE Public Cloud provider of choice for those arguing from an exclusionary perspective that Public Cloud is the only way forward.

Now, it’s pretty clear on AWS’ position on Private Cloud; straight form the horse’s mouth Werner says “Private Cloud is not the Cloud” (see below) — but it’s also clear they’re willing to sell you some 😉

The cost for VPC isn’t exorbitant, but it’s not free, either, so the business case is clearly there (see the official VPC site)– VPN connectivity is $0.05 per VPN connection with data transfer rates of $0.10 per GB inbound and ranging from $0.17 per GB – $0.10 per GB outbound depending upon volume (with heavy data replication or intensive workloads people are going to need to watch the odometer.)

I’m going to highlight a couple of nuggets from his post:

We continuously listen to our customers to make sure our roadmap matches their needs. One important piece of feedback that mainly came from our enterprise customers was that the transition to the cloud of more complex enterprise environments was challenging. We made it a priority to address this and have worked hard in the past year to find new ways to help our customers transition applications and services to the cloud, while protecting their investments in their existing IT infrastructure. …

Private Cloud Is Not The Cloud – These CIOs know that what is sometimes dubbed “private cloud” does not meet their goal as it does not give them the benefits of the cloud: true elasticity and capex elimination. Virtualization and increased automation may give them some improvements in utilization, but they would still be holding the capital, and the operational cost would still be significantly higher.

…

We have been listening very closely to the real requirements that our customers have and have worked closely with many of these CIOs and their teams to understand what solution would allow them to treat the cloud as a seamless extension of their datacenter, where their standard management practices can be applied with limited or no modifications. This needs to be a solution where they get all the benefits of cloud as mentioned above [Ed: eliminates cost, elastic, removes “undifferentiated heavy lifting”] while treating it as a part of their datacenter.

We have developed Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to allow our customers to seamlessly extend their IT infrastructure into the cloud while maintaining the levels of isolation required for their enterprise management tools to do their work.

With Amazon VPC you can:

• Create a Virtual Private Cloud and assign an IP address block to the VPC. The address block needs to be CIDR block such that it will be easy for your internal networking to route traffic to and from the VPC instance. These are addresses you own and control, most likely as part of your current datacenter addressing practice.
• Divide the VPC addressing up into subnets in a manner that is convenient for managing the applications and services you want run in the VPC.
• Create a VPN connection between the VPN Gateway that is part of the VPC instance and an IPSec-based VPN router on your own premises. Configure your internal routers such that traffic for the VPC address block will flow over the VPN.
• Start adding AWS cloud resources to your VPC. These resources are fully isolated and can only communicate to other resources in the same VPC and with those resources accessible via the VPN router. Accessibility of other resources, including those on the public internet, is subject to the standard enterprise routing and firewall policies.

Amazon VPC offers customers the best of both the cloud and the enterprise managed data center:

• Full flexibility in creating a network layout in the cloud that complies with the manner in which IT resources are managed in your own infrastructure.
• Isolating resources allocated in the cloud by only making them accessible through industry standard IPSec VPNs.
• Familiar cloud paradigm to acquire and release resources on demand within your VPC, making sure that you only use those resources you really need.
• Only pay for what you use. The resources that you place within a VPC are metered and billed using the familiar pay-as-you-go approach at the standard pricing levels published for all cloud customers. The creation of VPCs, subnets and VPN gateways is free of charge. VPN usage and VPN traffic are also priced at the familiar usage based structure

All the benefits from the cloud with respect to scalability and reliability, freeing up your engineers to work on things that really matter to your business.

Jeff Barr did a great job of giving a little more detail on his blog but also brought up a couple of points I need to noodle on from a security perspective:

Because the VPC subnets are used to isolate logically distinct functionality, we’ve chosen not to immediately support Amazon EC2 security groups. You can launch your own AMIs and most public AMIs, including Microsoft Windows AMIs. You can’t launch Amazon DevPay AMIs just yet, though.

The Amazon EC2 instances are on your network. They can access or be accessed by other systems on the network as if they were local. As far as you are concerned, the EC2 instances are additional local network resources — there is no NAT translation. EC2 instances within a VPC do not currently have Internet-facing IP addresses.

We’ve confirmed that a variety of Cisco and Juniper hardware/software VPN configurations are compatible; devices meeting our requirements as outlined in the box at right should be compatible too. We also plan to support Software VPNs in the near future.

The notion of the VPC and associated VPN connectivity coupled with the “software VPN” statement above reminds me of Cohesive F/T’s VPN-Cubed solution.  While this is an IaaS-focused discussion, it’s only fair to bring up Google’s Secure Data Connector that was announced some moons ago from a SaaS/PaaS perspective, too.

I would be remiss in my musings were I not to also suggest that Cloud brokers and Cloud service providers such as RightScale, GoGrid, Terremark, etc. were on the right path in responding to customers’ needs well before this announcement.

Further, it should be noted that now that the 800lb Gorilla has staked a flag, this will bring up all sorts of additional auditing and compliance questions, as any sort of broad connectivity into and out of security zones and asset groupings always do.  See the PCI debate (How to Be PCI Compliant In the Cloud)

At the end of the day, this is a great step forward toward — one I am happy to say that I’ve been talking about and presenting (see my Frogs presentation) for the last two years.

/Hoff

I was invited to add my comments to Appirio’s corporate blog in response to my opinions of their 2009 prediction “Rise and Fall of the Private Cloud,” but as I mentioned in kind on Twitter, debating a corporate talking point on a company’s blog is like watch two monkeys trying to screw a football; it’s messy and nobody wins.

However, in light of the fact that I’ve been preaching about the realities of phased adoption of Cloud — with Private Cloud being a necessary step — I thought I’d add my $0.02.  Of course, I’m doing so while on vacation, sitting on an ancient lava flow with my feet in the ocean in Hawaii, so it’s likely to be tropical in nature.

Short and sweet, here’s Appirio’s stance on Private Cloud:

Here’s the rub: Private clouds are just an expensive data center with a fancy name. We predict that 2009 will represent the rise and fall of this over-hyped concept. Of course, virtualization, service-oriented architectures, and open standards are all great things for every company operating a data center to consider. But all this talk about “private clouds” is a distraction from the real news: the vast majority of companies shouldn’t need to worry about operating any sort of data center anymore, cloud-like or not.

It’s clear that we’re talking about very different sets of companies. If we’re referring to SME/SMB’s, then I think it’s fair to suggest the sentiment above is valid.

If we’re talking about a large, heavily-regulated enterprise (pick your industry/vertical) with sunk costs and the desire/need to leverage the investment they’ve made in the consolidation, virtualization and enterprise modernization of their global datacenter footprints and take it to the next level, leveraging capabilities like automation, elasticity, and chargeback, it’s poppycock.

Further, it’s pretty clear that the hybrid model of Cloud will ultimately win in this space with the adoption of BOTH Public and Private Clouds where and when appropriate.

The idea that somehow companies can use “private cloud” technology to offer their employees web services similar to Google, Amazon, or salesforce.com will lead to massive disappointment.

So now the definition of “Cloud” is limited to “web services” and is defined by “Google, Amazon, or Salesforce.com?”

I call this MyopiCloud.  If this is the only measure of Cloud success, I’d be massively disappointed, also.

Onto the salient points:

Here’s why:

• Private clouds are sub-scale: There’s a reason why most innovative cloud computing providers have their roots in powering consumer web technology—that’s where the numbers are. Very few corporate data centers will see anything close to the type of volume seen by these vendors. And volume drives cost—the world has yet to see a truly “at scale” data center.

Interesting. If we hang the definition of “at scale” solely on Internet-based volume, I can see how this rings true.  However, large enterprises with LANs and WANs with multi-gigabit connectivity feeding server farms and client bases of internal constituents (not to mention extranet connections) need to be accounted for in that assessment, especially if we’re going to be honest about volume.  Limiting connectivity to only the Internet is unreasonable.

Certainly most enterprises are not autonomically elastic (neither are most Cloud providers today) but that’s why comparing apples to elephants is a bit silly, even with the benefits that virtualization is beginning to deliver in the compute, network and storage realms.

I know of an eCommerce provider who reports trafficing in (on average) 15 Gb/s of sustained HTTP traffic via its Internet feeds.  Want to guess what the internal traffic levels are inside what amounts to it’s Private Cloud at that level of ingress/egress?  Oh, did I just suggest that this “enterprise” is already running a “Private Cloud?”  Why yes, yes I did.  See James Watter’s interesting blog on something similar titled “Not So Fast Public Cloud: Big Players Still Run Privately.”

There’s no secret sauce: There’s no simple set of tricks that an operator of a data center can borrow from Amazon or Google. These companies make their living operating the world’s largest data centers. They are constantly optimizing how they operate based on real-time performance feedback from millions of transactions. (check out this presentation from Jeff Barr and Peter Coffee at the Architecture and Integration Summit). Can other operators of data centers learn something from this experience? Of course. But the rate of innovation will never be the same—private data centers will always be many, many steps behind the cloud.

Really? So technology such as Eucalyptus or VMware’s vCloud/Project Redwood doesn’t play here?  Certainly leveraging the operational models and technology underpinnings (regardless of volume) should allow an enterprise to scale massively, even it it’s not at the same levels, no?  The ability to scale to the needs of the business are important, even if you never do so at the scale of an AWS.  I don’t really understand this point.  My bandwidth is bigger than your bandwidth?

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks: What do you get when you move legacy applications as-is to a new and improved data center? Marginal improvements on your legacy applications. There’s only so much you can achieve without truly re-platforming your applications to a cloud infrastructure… you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Now that’s not entirely fair…. You can certainly teach an old dog to be better behaved. But it’s still an old dog.

Woof! It’s really silly to suggest that the only thing an enterprise will do is simply move “legacy applications as-is to a new and improved data center” without any enterprise modernization, any optimization or the ability to more efficiently migrate to new and improved applications as the agility, flexibility and mobility issues are tackled.  Talk about pissing on fire hydrants!

On-premise does not equal secure: the biggest driver towards private clouds has been fear, uncertainty, and doubt about security. For many, it just feels more secure to have your data in a data center that you control. But is it? Unless your company spends more money and energy thinking about security than Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, the answer is probably “no.” (Read Craig Balding walk through “7 Technical Security Benefits of Cloud Computing”)

I’ve got news for you, just as on-premise does “…not equal secure,” neither does off-premise assure such.  I offer you this post as an example with all it’s related posts for color.

Please show me empirically that Amazon, Google or Salesforce spends “…more money and energy thinking about security” than, say, a Fortune 100 company.  Better yet, please show me how I can be, say, PCI compliant using AWS?  Oh, right…Please see the aforementioned posts…especially the one that demonstrates how the most public security gaffes thus far in Cloud are related to the providers you cite in your example.

May I suggest that being myopic and mixing metaphors broadly by combining the needs and business drivers of the SME/SMB and representing them as that of large enterprises is intellectually dishonest.

Let’s be real, Appirio is in the business of “Enabling enterprise adoption of on-demand for Salesforce.com and Google Enterprise” — two examples of externally hosted SaaS offerings that clearly aren’t aimed at enterprises who would otherwise be thinking about Private Cloud.

Oops, the luau drums are sounding.

Aloha.

Charles Babcock at InformationWeek wrote an article titled “IBM Launches Appliance For Private Cloud Computing” in which he details IBM’s plans to bundle VMware with their WebSphere Application Server on an x86 platform, stir in chargeback/billing capability, call it “Hypervisor Edition” and sell it as an “appliance” that runs in “Private Clouds” for $45,000.

Bundling hardware with a virtualization platform as an appliance isn’t a new concept as everyone including Cisco is doing that.  However, the notion of bundling hardware with a virtualization platform and a virtual appliance and then labeling THAT an appliance “to disperse those applications to the cloud” is an ironic twist of marketing.

Tarting it up and calling it a “Cloud appliance” (the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance to be specific) that “…plugs into Private Clouds” is humorous:

IBM this week announced its WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance for deploying applications to a private cloud. IBM is the first major vendor to produce a cloud appliance for its customers, a sign of how the concepts of private cloud computing are getting a hearing in the deepest recesses of the enterprise.

Private clouds are scalable compute resources established in the enterprise data center that have been configured by IT to run a virtual machine upon demand. In some cases, business users are empowered to select an application and submit it as a virtualized workload to be run in the cloud.

The WebSphere Appliance stores and secures virtualized images of applications on a piece of IBM xSeries hardware that’s ready to be plugged into a private cloud, Tom Rosamilia, general manager of the applications and integration middleware division, said in an interview. That image will be cast in a VMware ESX Server file format for now; other hypervisor formats are likely to follow, he said. The WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition is also preloaded on the appliance and can run the virtualized image upon demand. The Hypervisor Edition is also new and both it and the appliance will become available by the end of the second quarter.

Hypervisor Edition is a version of the WebSphere Application Server designed to run virtualized applications on IBM’s x86-based server series. The appliance with application server will be priced at $45,000, Rosamilia said.

Having an application ready to run on a hardware appliance represents a number of short cuts for the IT staff, Rosamilia said. Once an application is configured carefully to run with its operating system and middleware, that version of the application is “freeze dried with its best practices into a virtualized image,” or a complete instance of the application with the software on which it depends.

Additional instances of the application can be started up as needed from this freeze-dried image without danger of configuration error, Rosamilia noted. The application is a service, awaiting its call to run in a virtual machine while on the WebSphere appliance. When it is run, the appliance logs the resources use and who used them for chargeback purposes, one of the requirements for successful private cloud operation, according to private cloud proponents.

Rosamilia said enterprises that have applications that are already configured as a service or sets of services will find those applications fitting easily into a cloud infrastructure. An appliance approach makes it simple “to disperse those applications to the cloud” with a lower set of skills than IT currently needs to configure and deploy an application in the data center.

So now, for the first time ever, you can leverage virtualization to run a “freeze-dried” VM application/service on an x86 server appliance in the datacenter Private Cloud! Awesome. You heard it here second.

Is it any wonder people are confused by Private Clouds? Selling software disguised as a virtual machine, coupled to hardware, but abstracted by a hypervisor as a bundled “appliance” ISN’T Cloud Computing. It’s box pushing.

Not that I should be surprised.

<sigh>

/Hoff

Mary Jo Foley asked the question in her blog titled: ‘Private cloud’ = just another buzzword for on-premise datacenter?

What’s really funny is that she’s not really asking.  She’s already made her mind up:

Whether or not they admit it publicly (or just express their misgivings relatively privately), Microsoft officials know the “private cloud” is just the newest way of talking about an on-premise datacenter. Sure, it’s not exactly the same mainframe-centric datacenter IT admins may have found themselves outfitting a few years ago. But, in a nutshell, server + virtualization technology + integrated security/management/billing  = private cloud.

Microsoft’s “official” description of the distinction between private and public clouds basically says as much. From a press release the company issued this morning:

The private cloud: “By employing techniques like virtualization, automated management, and utility-billing models, IT managers can evolve the internal datacenter into a ‘private cloud’ that offers many of the performance, scalability, and cost-saving benefits associated with public clouds. Microsoft provides the foundation for private clouds with infrastructure solutions to match a range of customer sizes, needs and geographies.

The public cloud: “Cloud computing is expanding the traditional web-hosting model to a point where enterprises are able to off-load commodity applications to third-party service providers (hosters) and, in the near future, the Microsoft Azure Services Platform. Using Microsoft infrastructure software and Web-based applications, the public cloud allows companies to move applications between private and public clouds.”

Firstly, Microsoft defines their notion of Public and Private Clouds based upon the limits of their product offerings.  In their terms, Private Clouds = Hyper-V, Public Clouds = Azure.  Never the two shall meet. So using these definitions, sure, Private Clouds are just “on-premise datacenters.”  She ought to know.  She wrote about it here and I responded in a post titled “Incomplete Thought: Looking At An “Open & Interoperable Cloud” Through Azure-Colored Glasses”

Private Clouds aren’t just virtualized datacenters with chargeback/billing.

As I’ve said here many, many times, this sort of definition is short-sighted, inaccurate and limiting:

Private Clouds: Even A Blind Squirrel Finds A Nut Once In A While
The Vagaries Of Cloudcabulary: Why Public, Private, Internal & External Definitions Don’t Work…
Internal v. External/Private v. Public/On-Premise v. Off- Premise: It’s all Cloud But How You Get There Is Important.
Private Clouds: Your Definition Sucks
Mixing Metaphors: Private Clouds Aren’t Defined By Their Location…

Can we stop butchering this term now, please?

So no, Private Cloud is NOT just a euphemism for on-premise datacenters.

/Hoff

Over the last month it’s been gratifying to watch the “mainstream” IT press provide more substantive coverage on the emergence and acceptance of Private Clouds after the relatively dismissive stance prior.  

I think this has a lot to do with the stabilization of definitions and applications of Cloud Computing and it’s service variants as well as the realities of Cloud adoption in large enterprises and the timing it involves.

To me, Private Clouds represent the natural progression toward wider scale Cloud adoption for larger enterprises with sunk costs and investments in existing infrastructure and it has always meant more than simply “Amazon-izing your Intranet.”  Private Clouds offer larger enterprises a logical, sustainable and intelligent path forward from their virtualization and automation initiatives in play already.

I think my definition a few months ago was still a little rough, but it gets the noodle churning:

Private clouds are about extending the enterprise to leverage infrastructure that makes use of cloud computing capabilities and is not (only) about internally locating the resources used to provide service.  It’s also not an all-or-nothing proposition.

It occurs to me that private clouds make a ton of sense as an enabler to enterprises who want to take advantage of cloud computing for any of the oft-cited reasons, but are loathe to (or unable to) surrender their infrastructure and applications without sufficient control.  Private clouds mean that an enterprise can decide how and how much of the infrastructure can/should be maintained as a non-cloud operational concern versus how much can benefit from the cloud.

Private clouds make a ton of sense; they provide the economic benefits of outsourced scaleable infrastructure that does not require capital outlay, the needed control over that infrastructure combined with the ability to replicate existing topologies and platforms and ultimately the portability of applications and workflow.  These capabilities may eliminate the re-write and/or re-engineering of applications like is often required when moving to typical IaaS (infrastructure as a Service) player such as Amazon.

From a security perspective — which is very much my focus — private clouds provide me with a way of articulating and expressing the value of cloud computing while still enabling me to manage risk to an acceptable level as chartered by my mandate.

Here are some of the blog entries I’ve written on Private Clouds. I go into reasonable detail in my “Frogs Who Desired a King” Cloud Security presentation.  James Urquhart’s got some doozies, too.  Here’s a great one.  Chuck Hollis has been pretty vocal on the subject.

My Google Reader has no less than 10 articles on Private Clouds in the last day or so including an interesting one featuring GE’s initiative over the next three years.

I hope the dialog continues and we can continue to make headway in arriving at common language and set of use cases, but as I discovered a couple of weeks ago, in my post titled “The Vagaries Of Cloudcabulary: Why Public, Private, Internal & External Definitions Don’t Work…”, the definition of Private Cloud is the most variable of all and promotes the most contentious of debates:

Private Clouds seem to point to validate the proimise of what real time infrastructure/adapative enterprise visions painted many years ago, with the potential for even more scale and control.  The intersection of virtualization, automation, Cloud and converged and unified computing are making sure of that.

/Hoff

I think we have a failure to communicate…or at least I do.

Tonight I was listening to David Linthicum’s podcast titled “The Harsh Realities Of Private Clouds” in which he referenced and lauded Dimitry Sotnikov’s blog of the same titled “No Real Private Clouds Yet?“

I continue to scratch my head not because of David’s statements that he’s yet to find any “killer applications” for Private Clouds but rather the continued unappetizing use of the definition (quoting Dimitry) of a Private Cloud:

In a nutshell, private clouds are Amazon-like cost-effective and scalable infrastructures but run by companies themselves within their firewalls.

This seems to be inline with Gartner’s view of Private Clouds also:

The future of corporate IT is in private clouds, flexible computing networks modeled after public providers such as Google and Amazon yet built and managed internally for each business’s users

My issue is again that of the referenced location and perimeter.  It’s like we’ve gone back to the 80’s with our screened subnet architectural Maginot lines again!  “This is inside, that is outside.”

That makes absolutely zero sense given the ubiquity, mobility and transitivity of information and platforms today.  I understand the impetus to return back to the mainframe in the sky, but c’mon…

For me, I’d take a much more logical and measured approach to this definition. I think there’s a step missing in the definitions above and how Private Clouds really ought to be described and transitioned to.

I think that the definitions above are too narrow end exculpatory in definition when you consider that you are omitting solutions like GoGrid’s CloudCenter concepts — extending your datacenter via VPN onto a cloud IaaS provider whose infrastructure is not yours, but offers you the parity or acceptable similarity in platform, control, policy enforcement, compliance, security and support to your native datacenter.

In this scenario, the differentiator between the “public” and “private” is then simply a descriptor defining from whom and where the information and applications running on that cloud may be accessed:

From the “Internet” = Public Cloud.  From the “Intranet” (via a VPN connection between the internal datacenter and the “outsourced” infrastructure) = Private Cloud.

Check out James Urquhart’s thoughts along these lines in his post titled “The Argument For Private Clouds.”

As I wrote in my post titled “Mixing Metaphors: Private Clouds Aren’t Defined By Their Location“:

Private clouds are about extending the enterprise to leverage infrastructure that makes use of cloud computing capabilities and is not (only) about internally locating the resources used to provide service.  It’s also not an all-or-nothing proposition.

It occurs to me that private clouds make a ton of sense as an enabler to enterprises who want to take advantage of cloud computing for any of the oft-cited reasons, but are loathe to (or unable to) surrender their infrastructure and applications without sufficient control.

Private clouds mean that an enterprise can decide how and how much of the infrastructure can/should be maintained as a non-cloud operational concern versus how much can benefit from the cloud.

Private clouds make a ton of sense; they provide the economic benefits of outsourced scaleable infrastructure that does not require capital outlay, the needed control over that infrastructure combined with the ability to replicate existing topologies and platforms and ultimately the portability of applications and workflow.

These capabilities may eliminate the re-write and/or re-engineering of applications like is often required when moving to typical IaaS (infrastructure as a Service) player such as Amazon.

From a security perspective — which is very much my focus — private clouds provide me with a way of articulating and expressing the value of cloud computing while still enabling me to manage risk to an acceptable level as chartered by my mandate.

So why wouldn’t a solution like GoGrid’s CloudCenter offering paired with CohesiveFT’s VPN Cubed and no direct “public” Internet originated access to my resources count as Private Cloud Computing?

I get all the benefits of elasticity, utility billing, storage, etc., don’t have to purchase the hardware, and I decide based upon risk what I am willing to yield to that infrastructure.

David brought up the notion of proprietary vendor lock-in, but yet we see GoGrid has also open sourced their CloudCenter API OpenSpec…

Clearly I’m mad because I simply don’t see why folks are painting Private Clouds into a corner only to say that we’re years away from recognizing their utility when in fact we have the technology, business need and capability to deliver them today.

/Hoff

There's been a ton of back and forth recently debating the arguments — pro and con — of the need for and very existence of "private clouds."

EMC today launched two new private cloud architect certifications.  I find it intriguing that the certification is described as “Leverag[ing] ‘open’ curriculum training and certification focused on technology concepts and principles applicable to any vendor environment.”  I’ll be interested to see how applicable to Citrix and Hyper-V environments the courseware is… 😉

From their community blog:

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• Creating A New Generation Of Cloud Professionals (chucksblog.emc.com)