AWS says private clouds are vaporware Amazon Web Services (AWS) Adam Selipsky has told an event in Sydney, Australia, that private clouds aren't really clouds. There's an element of “of course he would say that, wouldn't he” about Selipsky's remarks, which were made at an AWS Summit at which he preached to the choir by reciting AWS' well-worn mantra about low …
Not the only difference, there's also that opex vx capex thing. With a private cloud, you have the additional burden of the capital expenditure. With Amazon's cloud, you don't have that big, nasty, up-front cost.
Of course, you do have a smaller cost, that goes on, and on and on, month after month after month, and before you know it, you've paid more to Amazon than the original capex "saving".
Every time I look at off-prem cloud pricing, it seems wildy unecomonic in the medium to long term for even relatively low utilisation levels.
Being pedantic I know, but allocating expenses on balance sheets has nothing to do with public vs private cloud, just owned hardware vs non-owned hardware usage regardless of the business model used to lease it (ie, per device or per clock cycle).
Trying to put a dividing line between a public and private cloud is nonsensical. How big does my organisation's cloud have to get before it is indistinguishable from someone else's public cloud? If I call my business's departments 'customers', does that mean I've now got a small public cloud? This is just another case of marketing people throwing buzz words around and hoping nobody notices that their logic is based on very shaky foundations.
"owned hardware vs non-owned hardware usage regardless of the business model used to lease it"
If it's owned, it's not leased.
"If I call my business's departments 'customers', does that mean I've now got a small public cloud? "
No, because the data is still stored on corporate-owned and -controlled hardware, not hardware owned and managed by a third party. What you choose to call your business departments is irrelevant.
There's quite a lot of untapped excess hardware / software / storage sitting in many of the Fortune 500 server rooms I've worked in, so I have no doubt excess capacity exists. Dedicated lines are in place too between offices, so there wouldn't be nasty security surprises or the bitter after-taste of downtime from the likes of AWS & MS.... The real question is whether its scalable and can be offered-up easily as an available resource...? I wonder too if the will exists within data centres to share the resources...?
I'm surprised Selipsky wasted his breath on this old chestnut. Most of us in the Cloud game stopped having this argument around 2008...
YES it's true that Private Clouds very rarely exhibit the NIST 'essential characteristics'
IT's also True that the NIST definition contains reference to Private Cloud as a service model (though they clearly view it as relevant for Corporations that follow the Business Unit model and are capable of service orientation of their internal products)
It's also a case that, IMO, you can't leverage the scale (eg App Eco-system) in a Private context
Frankly, most so-called Private Clouds are little more than heavily virtualised data-centres,
Trouble is...So what? It doesn't really affect the AWS business model (and hints that Amazon are worried should be treated with the joviality they so clearly deserve!) ... Those who love 'em will use 'em and those that don't, won't.
....that's pretty much where the interested/argumentative left it in 2008. Let sleeping pooches lie, I say ;)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
