…or do I need a new Blog title? One to think on perhaps!. Anyway, as I have noted before it is a fascinating time to be IT as cloud related technologies drive further and further into traditional IT. There have been another couple of stories over the last few weeks of established Enterprises embracing and moving to the public cloud which is exciting as it shows the growing maturity of the offerings. Clearly a canned press release is not a detailed insight in to an organisation’s infrastructure but I do ask myself are they building up problems for tomorrow?
Public cloud is an opportunity to really drive economies and responsiveness in to IT, yet when people talk about public cloud adoption they seem to imply they are moving to a single provider and betting the farm on them.
When I think about Cloud I think not IaaS and provisioning servers at the click of a button (which feels the biggest driver when you boil it all down), but rather applications written so that we can transparently move workloads between cloud providers – chasing the best deal. January may see us on Amazon, February on Rackspace and March on Azure – who knows. If I have this flexibility and capability I can drive really tough deals with my cloud partners and insulate myself from failures. If I just move to one cloud provider and tool all my deployments and management systems to support that one provider the cost of moving out is huge – great for the account team for the cloud guys! In a similar vein I am still unsure on what the best long term answer is for storage – if the costs go up or a provider goes bust / gets hacked getting tera or peta bytes of data out – *shudder*!
As you may have guessed I am hybrid cloud man, perhaps interestingly, I am not necessarily sure about requiring a DC of my own – it could be another cloud provider or a VPC for that matter. The image below shows how I think of hybrid cloud – two or more fabrics providing a common set of services enabling portability and business continuity.
Obviously I have no idea or inside information on the future pricing strategies for public cloud, it seems clear now that prices will keep tumbling as the competition to build a viable business hots up – but let’s be honest once the market has matured are we certain that those loss-leader prices won’t start to creep up, or worse, the provider we’ve chosen won’t shut up shop? What then if we haven’t kept an eye on how to get out?
Please note this post was originally posted on LinkedIn
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