Charles Makes a Point (or Two)

It appears I'm not the only one who thinks all this talk of 'clouds' is just a lot of hot air. Recently, Amazon and the VCE team have been going back and forth over the use of the term 'private cloud', and I find the comments from both sides interesting.

You can read about Amazon's shot across the bow here:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/175953,video-time-to-kill-the-private-cloud.aspx

And the VCE team's response here:

http://www.crn.com.au/News/213820,vce-execs-defend-private-cloud-at-emc-inform.aspx

To summarize things, Amazon says that the idea of 'private cloud' ignores critical concepts like pay as you go, capacity on demand, and the idea that cloud is all about saving costs (since you still have to lay out capital to own the hardware). Their CTO argues that cloud is not about technology, it is about th advantages it brings. He also says that private cloud is a lot of marketing fluff (my assessment of his quote). Meanwhile, the VCE crowd (if you don't know, VCE stands for VMware, Cisco, and EMC) is beating the drum of revolution, and positioning the 'public cloud' as a consumer tool. It is 'hallucinatory' (a pretty interesting choice of words, IMHO) to think that enterprises who have invested in infrastructure will just throw it all out and dump their applications onto Amazon's cloud offering. To me, the truth of the matter is they're both right.

As I've said before, I think the talk about cloud is just that -- talk. No one implements a cloud. Clouds don't have any structure, any solid foundation, and reliability -- they go where the wind blows them. The metaphor doesn't just limp, it's lame. This concept shouldn't be about specific technologies, to Amazon's point, but it does require some fundamental things to work right, like virtualization (in whatever form it might take). I find it interesting that the VCE crowd points to hardware/software installs to demonstrate that the private cloud does indeed exist. It points out that though their marketing engine is in full swing, they don't understand the fundamental value of the combined technologies. The proof of private cloud isn't in how many UCS servers are deployed or how many licenses of VMware exist, guys, it's how many customers you have who adopted the combined force of your technologies and completely virtualized everything, creating a 100% uptime, flexible, constantly flexing environment. Talk to us about THAT.

To defend the VCE guys, though, they are approaching this "revolution" (another way over-used term) in a sensible way; as is quoted in the article, this is about incremental change. You don't just hear about something like this and throw everything you've built away, turning over application reliability, uptime, and security to an Internet company that can't always keep their own store online. Not if you like keeping your job, anyway.

This is about making network, compute, and storage a utility. Make the technology simple and easy to scale so you can work on the applications and the business metrics. Stop having to worry about how to design a server or your network, or your storage for a new application and just provide it resource units. That's got nothing to do with a cloud, but it has everything to do with building out a great architecture, and until Amazon and the other players can prove they can, over the Internet, provide the same level of security, performance, reliability and uptime as gear in my datacenter, they don't win the battle.

I've been getting push back on the idea that cloud computing has challenges becoming reality.  A lot of people seem to think it's already accomplished.  Private clouds, Amazon, Google, backup in the cloud, it's all happening. 

A thing hit me the other day while I was talking with someone about why Google Apps isn't a bigger hit in the Enterprise space (another topic for another day).  It occurs to me that one of the major reasons we aren't seeing more adoption (in addition to my other theories) is that there aren't many players.  Why aren't there many players?  The same reason a lot of 'good ideas' don't see the light of day: people haven't figured out how to really make money at it yet.

If you want to build these highly robust, highly available, highly flexible infrastructures that people can count on to run parts of their revenue-generating infrastructure (which if you want Enterprise customers you need to have), you don't go down to Best Buy and by some 1TB hard drives and some white box PCs.  You buy Enterprise infrastructure components.  That's not cheap (have you seen VMware license costs?).  This isn't a charity endeavor.  It's got to be profitable. 

Sure, you could try the Google approach with how they've built out their commodity-based infrastructure, but how many people does it then take to manage it?  People are obviously more expensive than technology, and at the scales this is supposed to work at, you need the technology or you need the people.  Either way your profit margins are slim.

This might be the biggest barrier yet.  What do you think?