David Chappell

Opinari

The Microsoft Private Cloud: A Technology Overview
# Friday, October 14, 2011

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If I ruled the world, I'd make using the phrase "private cloud" illegal. Obviously, though, I don't rule the world, and so this term has (sadly) become the standard way to describe using IaaS technology in your datacenter.

Confusing as it is, however, I'd argue strongly that there's a clear definition of "private cloud" that pretty much all analysts and vendors in this space agree on. It's not the same thing as ordinary virtualization, nor is it legitimate to start calling your datacenter a private cloud without making any changes. Instead, the core of a private cloud is IaaS--VMs on demand--along with perhaps other services, such as deploying applications. Most people want to use private clouds in their own datacenters, although some also want to link up with IaaS offerings from service providers.

To help clarify at least part of this story, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper describing the private cloud technology embedded in System Center 2012. I've come to believe that anybody interested in cloud computing shouldn't ignore private clouds, if only because they're likely to be where a majority of cloud-focused money gets spent in the next couple of years. If you're interested in learning more about this technology area and the Microsoft approach in particular, the paper is available here.

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Comments:

Hello David, I couldn’t agree with you more about the use of the term "Private Cloud" as an alternative for IaaS. YES! This should become illegal but only if we omit the role of applications and look through the narrow view of infrastructure only. But looking how applications are being transformed to enable true multi-tenant, service self-service then we can realize the true importance of implementing private cloud to provide scale and flexibility needed to transform virtualized datacenters to acquire the spirit of public clouds , however, yet still on dedicated servers

# posted by Tamer Salah : October 20, 2011 1:49 AM

I agree with ya Dave. End of story.

I think the use of "Private Cloud" just adds a horrible array of confusion to what is cloud computing. Cloud computing itself was already confusing and obfuscates the actual technological points of the capabilities around the various aspects it theoretically includes.

Tamer Salah - I'm partially in agreement with you. However, there is no public cloud comparison to virtualized private data centers as you point out. The largest Enterprise on earth is not going to come close to what Joyent and AWS have achieved. On agreement with what you said, a large part of this is the software and how it is enabled in a truly public cloud environment.

However, I digress, I'm off to build some of that software. Cheers! :)

# posted by Anonymous : November 01, 2011 9:46 AM