Friday, October 12, 2012

Private Cloud - Thanks to the Innovators

I am beginning to believe that 2012 will be the year in which private cloud adoption moves from primarily Innovators to Early Adopters. One might argue that we're already there since Eucalyptus customers include 20% of the Fortune 100. Still, there are easily tens of thousands of businesses that could reap the benefits of private and hybrid cloud.

So why aren't more businesses putting private cloud to good use? Well, it's not lack of interest. We've seen over 25,000 Eucalyptus clouds start within a year, so clearly there is potential demand building up. It must be something else. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that "the cloud" hasn't been well understood and that private cloud software has been, until recently, difficult to install / configure / manage.

The folks willing to take a chance on private cloud have been the innovators. They, as Geoffrey Moore would tell you, understand the potential value AND have the technical wherewithal to cobble together disparate components to create the first few working versions. The innovators have demonstrated that private and hybrid cloud solutions aren't just technically feasible, but actually provide real value to developers, IT and the business as a whole.

Over the past few years we've worked along side them and learned (the hard way) how to build the kind of software that can transform businesses. We've put that experience into education and certification programs. We've vastly improved the setup and configuration experience. We've made all our code open sourced. What the Innovators helped pioneer has made it easier for nearly anyone to spin up their own private cloud.

If you've ever wished your IT resources could be as easy to provision and use as Amazon Web Services, then this is the right time to check out Eucalyptus.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Hybrid Cloud: Public to Private


Prior to joining Eucalyptus I heard a lot of hype around Hybrid Cloud - the combination of on premise and public clouds. Most of the time someone would talk about how businesses were going to run applications behind the firewall (private cloud) and "burst" to the public cloud when demand exceeded thresholds. What I soon discovered was that "cloud bursting" was closer to hype. On the other hand, there were real hybrid cloud use cases that were delivering real value to customers.

This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I explore hybrid cloud scenarios. We'll begin with the model that many organizations started with over the past 5 years - using Public then Private clouds.

Why Start with Public Clouds

An application begins its life cycle within the public cloud for any number of reasons. If you look back 4 or more years ago, there wasn't much in the way of private clouds so we can skip the obvious "there is no private cloud" reason. These days there tend to be two common reasons developers adopt public clouds; it's faster and it's cheaper. Let's consider those in turn.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Time to reboot

First blog posts are the hardest to write and the least likely to be read. So the only point of getting this first post published is to make way for something more interesting to write about.

1 down. Many more to go.