Private vs. Public Cloud

Google came out with a blog post recently touting their public cloud vision. VMware responded with a blog touting why the private cloud concept was better. Who's right? Both of them. VMWare's private cloud vision will help companies maximize their existing infrastructure investment, while Google (and Amazon) is focused on building a platform for the future. The comment I left on the VMWare blog is an attempt to marry these two visions into a near term and long term strategy. Here's what I wrote:

This is a great post and brings some sanity back to Google's claims, but there are some points missing:

First I have to agree, for companies that have already made a capital investment in infrastructure, using VMWare to create a private, internal cloud is the way to go to maximize flexibility, elasticity and utilization. But there is one thing the public cloud providers have that ultimately will win the race, multi-tenancy. The public cloud providers have the ability to house multiple companies/accounts on the same hardware to maximize utilization. This ultimately will lend to higher utilization and a lower cost/CPU cycle. It's very difficult for a company to achieve the same levels of utilization/efficiency independently, particularly if IT is not their core business.

There are privacy and security issues that accompany multi-tenancy but ultimately they will be worked out. There are bright minds working on them and at the end of the day, it just makes sense. This is why power plants exist and every building/house doesn't run it's own generator anymore.

On the point of flexibility, Google is a bit behind but Amazon's EC2 supports a myriad of platforms, including Windows, Solaris and Linux. To remain competitive, Google will need to as well.

In the near term, private and hybrid clouds will take hold. But on the 5-10 year horizon, it's seems that the promise of the public cloud's economies of scale will ultimately triumph (for all but the most private applications).

Whether you choose to invest in a private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure depends on your company's infrastructure capital investment to date, SLA and privacy needs.

1) My suggestion for large enterprises with an internally hosted data center, is to build your private cloud, but look for opportunities to start porting non-mission critical VMs (i.e. test environments, departmental apps) to the public cloud. Over time, as the public cloud matures, more and more of your private cloud's assets can be moved, so you can stop investing capital dollars in soon-to-be-outdated hardware.

2) For those who are outsourcing their data center to a 3rd party, you have incredible leverage to challenge their current pricing models, and if they don't play ball, you have motivation to start moving items to the public cloud more quickly.

3) For SMBs, startups and companies experiencing rapid growth, the public cloud is where you should focus your investment/move your assets. Get on the platform of the future now, so you don't have to pay to move to it later.

If you have any questions on how to do any of these things, drop me an email and lets talk.

-J