David Chappell

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Platforms in the Cloud: Where Will Your Next Application Run?  
# Wednesday, April 07, 2010
 
ESRI has posted the slides from the keynote I gave at their Developer Summit last month. The talk takes a big-picture view of cloud platforms today, providing a taxonomy for thinking about the leading offerings (both public and private). It ends with a look at what ESRI is doing in the cloud, but most of the talk isn't specific to the GIS world.


After resisting it for quite a while, I've given in to using the IaaS/PaaS categorization for public cloud platforms. I still think it's full of problems, but whether I like it or not, this way of talking about the space has become almost universal.

And I'm still not crazy about the term "private cloud". Technically, a private cloud is essentially IaaS in your data center, but the large scale and pay-as-you-go economics of public clouds aren't available in typical private clouds. This makes them different in fundamentally important ways. Still, it's clear that private clouds are what most people think of as the evolution of today's virtualized data centers, and the term is clearly here to stay.

As these slides suggest, we're seeing some convergence of what cloud platforms provide. This is a good thing--it's what happens as markets mature--but there's still a long way to go. As I'm so fond of saying, big platform shifts like this happen rarely; it's a great time to be alilve.


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Comments:

The slides are locked by password.
Could you please share with us?

Thank you!
 

I'm not having any problem accessing the slides--might you try again?
 

Hi David, maybe another usage of this terms might help:
The term 'private cloud' is used for example by EMC defining the whole of cloud elements that are controlled/surrounded with privacy by the Enterprise owning the data. The part in the company owned Datacenters is further defined as the "internal cloud" part, as opposed to the "external cloud", which consist of elements living in public cloud space, but being secured and controlled by the company.

So private is what is company controlled (i.e. in which country data is stored - compliance!), public is what is consuming public resources, out of the control of the Enterprise owning the data.

Hope this is inspirational.
 

Yes--that's how VMware uses the term, something I often describe when I present these slides. In fact, my first draft of this presentation used this definition--I really like it. Sadly, though, I decided that it was likely to confuse people, since only VMware uses the terms in this way.

This is the core reason why the term "private cloud" troubles me. Every vendor defines it a way that makes it mean "What I sell". As a result, the term's meaning has become quite blurry.
 

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