After fighting a rearguard action against the term "private cloud," I accept its inevitability.
It's not that I ever disagreed with the premise that many (even most) enterprises would want to keep significant swaths of their computing infrastructure within their firewalls. And it wasn't that I thought IT departments would eschew techniques and computing models from the cloud for their internal applications.
Rather, it was simply that the grand vision of cloud computing as the electric power grid for a new age specifically excludes everyone continuing to run their own data centers.
Put another way, this vision is about economics, not technology. Sure, it is made possible by things like distributed computing architectures and fast networks. But, as electricity just happens to be the form of energy that can be practically delivered over a power grid, so too are the tools of cloud computing merely the means to let multi-tenant providers deliver software services at massive scale.
There are certainly interesting economics associated with public clouds for SMBs and for larger organizations that need temporary capacity for specific projects. But cloud computing is not solely about Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Or even mostly. There is no "Big Switch."
Therefore, while it's probably more accurate to call it private cloud-style computing or something along those lines, that's unbearably awkward, so we might as well just go with "private cloud."
So does that mean that all enterprise IT is, or will become, some sort of internal cloud?
Here I draw the line. Composing black-letter rules for what is and isn't cloud computing within an organization isn't productive. But cloud computing at least tends toward a number of properties and characteristics. At least some of these have to be present to greater or lesser degree if calling something a "cloud" is to have any meaning at all.
These include:
Dynamic IT infrastructure. To a lot of people, this means server virtualization (that is, a hypervisor) in concert with orchestration software that can allocate resources to workloads in real-time in response to established policies. That's fine as far as it goes, although I'd argue that high-performance computing and Web 2.0 services can benefit from analogous but different approaches to dynamism and that such infrastructures are legitimately clouds as well.
Services orientation. Cloud computing is Service-Oriented Architecture 2.0, in a sense, albeit an SOA that's more loosely coupled and more "Webby" in nature than the original enterprise application-flavored SOA. Essentially SOA means that an "application" is actually an assembly of autonomous services. This is a good fit with dynamic infrastructures because these services can easily scale independently from each other in a way that would be difficult if they were hard-wired.
Network-centricity. Even absent cloud computing, there's already been a significant shift toward applications that are delivered to users in a more device- and location-independent way. In practice this often means through a browser, although other types of relatively lightweight clients (such as Rich Internet Applications) are common as well. This sort of delivery even more strongly defines cloud applications, often combined with self-service provisioning through some sort of portal. Network-centricity has other implications as well -- such as a security model that doesn't depend on locked-down endpoint devices.
Other characteristics include metering that enables chargeback and usage-based billing and interoperability in various forms.
Ultimately, cloud computing is not a checklist of very specific things so much as a general approach for the next wave of computing. And a lot of enterprise IT shops are genuinely interested in the idea of cloud computing -- even if they're not about to move important applications to Amazon Web Services.
— Gordon Haff, Senior Analyst at Illuminata Inc. on grids/supercomputing
Rimman - yep, same song (I've called it 'Clouds' my bad) different parts, which is interesting. While I agree that we really don't know jack about clouds or the full usability, I wonder if it's something who's time has finally come to be fully explored.
I think that's a good way of putting it. Whatever we call the whole "thing," I think we'll see a general evolution to certain ways that people generally architect new applications and operate their datacenters. And there will be a variety of approaches depending upon the organizations needs and preferences. That's why I'm not big on rigid taxonomies here but do think it's useful to think of how applications and operations are changing (which they are).
And I just can't seem to get Joni Mitchell's "Clouds" out of my head - in either the original or newly minted re-visit. Perhaps it's true "Rows and flows of angel hair, and ice cream castles in the air" we chould look at clouds that way.
A great deal of good discussion! I tend to believe that as we get a bit more moisture in the atmosphere, we'll get to a point where clearer defining scenarios will have made there way through the process and allow all of us to know "Stratus" from "Nimbus" technologies regardless of the wind direction.
I don't think it really matters what people say about this whole "cloud" issue, every time we turn around, someone figures out a differnt way to describe it and there is no concrete understanding of what "the cloud" is for all situations.
When you read all of the opinions and descriptions, it's like the famous 19th Century poem by John Godfrey Saxe about "The Blind Men and the Elephant". Everyone approaches this from adifferent angle, and their perspective of the situation is completely dependent upon that. It's a tree, a rope, a wall, a fan...
At home, users may employ a server-lite environment where all of their data resides on one main 'box' and that same box is used as a print server others connect to and send files to print from one common device. Is this a cloud? As some see it' sure, it's mini-cloud.
At work, (small company, 5-10 users) all applications may reside on one server and users have computers that are essentially 'dumb terminals" to borrow an age old model, where the storage and applications reside elsewhere and you simply connect to the server for all of your computing power and storage needs. Is this a cloud? Yep, you can sure say it is... and it's bigger than the home cloud above.
And you can keep expanding this out to larger companies, departments within larger enterprises, enterprises within multinationals, and on and on.
There is never gong to be a clear definition of 'the cloud' because each instance of it is different, and each instance requires it's own architecture, practices, policies, processes, and on and on.
Yes. That more extreme the decoupling the further away we probably are from seeing it in broad use. However, some elements are closer--for example, using cloud storage in conjunction with a local application.
This is really implied in your piece, Gordon, but I'd say it's worth stating explicitly:
All or as many as possible of the elements of an end-to-end "computing experience" are independently sourced, and can be drawn on as needed. In other words, one can "virtualize" not just the OS instances and the apps running on them, but also storage (well underway), gang-up processing power, maybe even electricity...
I prefer the "whatever we feel like calling cloud" approach because I'm pretty sure that if IT employees put "Implemented private cloud" on their CVs, their income will go up. I always like having my income go up.
It did make me think about Lick again -- too bad we don't have anyone like that in computing these days.
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