Network World is now running a new feature called “
Tech Debate,” where they’re pitting industry experts against each other to debate current hot topics. Not surprisingly, this week’s topic was “
Cloud: Public or Private,” which pitted Dave Malcolm, Chief Technology Officer of Surgient, arguing for private clouds against Siki Giunta, Global VP of Cloud Computing & Cloud Services of CSC, arguing for public.
We’re in Dave’s corner in this debate, but don’t feel that this conversation is as black and white as the media would like it to be. Ideally, private clouds provide IT and end users ways to manage, allocate and share resources and workloads that maximize the entire infrastructure while keeping information secure within the firewall. In addition, deploying a private cloud using an independent management layer also helps avoid lock-in issues because it provides the means to help make physical and virtual--as well as legacy and new systems--interoperable.
For companies with small IT teams or less complicated compute needs, the public cloud can be an easy answer. But companies with large IT teams and more complex infrastructures, however, can spend a small fortune for enterprise apps, and have often built intricate infrastructures that can be a tangled web of legacy systems and architectures. Add in a global presence and high performance compute requirements and the desire to manage that infrastructure securely and safely is an increasingly important element in evaluating cloud technologies. Can you trust your apps to the public cloud? If you are at one of these big global brands that I mentioned before, I can bet your legal departments probably don’t want you to.
As for the scale argument that Giunta poses when it comes to public clouds, scale isn’t limited to the public cloud domain. Having come from a distributing computing background and managed cluster and grid systems for everything from large financial institutions running complex trading algorithms to heavy scientific research calculations, we’ve been scaling huge systems within firewalls for years. Public clouds may be able to add capacity for hybrid situations and may give SMBs what they need to start easily and scale fast, but enterprises will ultimately need to build out their own systems that meet their needs for security, provisioning and management.
Other than shared resources, there was another thing about cloud computing that also became clear to me at the conference - all cloud implementations tend to have three key capabilities. The first is the capability to manage resources. This means the management tools implementing cloud must be able to recognize all types of resources – or in other words heterogeneous resources. Cloud management tools must be able to manage these heterogeneous resources through provisioning mechanisms, whether physical or virtual. The second is the capability to manage the software stack, or at least part of the software stack. Monitoring utilization data characteristics from physical resources is common, but monitoring utilization data in the software stack is less common, and certainly not generally inclusive of the entire software stack (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) under a single tool. But even if there were a single management tool that could monitor the entire software stack and had a dashboard that could clearly communicate the state of each tier within the stack, manual changes to the infrastructure to improve performance and efficiency would still be necessary. So this brings up a third capability that is needed: the ability to manage changes in the infrastructure through a set of policies. That is, to automatically make application and platform resource adjustments at any level in the software stack in order to improve utilization and efficient.
Well, at least this is what I learned. When I talk about cloud I will be thinking about all three capabilities in management solutions. It doesn’t matter which use case or how big or little your use case is, if you can include all three of these basic cloud capabilities you will have a more efficient cloud. Of course the ‘got to be open’, and ‘work with key partners’ practices are always important too. But for cloud, I’m basing the best solution based on principle.
