I am enjoying the furore around the definition that has erupted around the recent announcement by Amazon about their Virtual Private Cloud offering. Amazon has used their position as the de-facto market gorillas in the cloud market to swiftly redefine the ‘private cloud’ that other vendors have been talking about.
As recently as the middle of last year, the concept of a ‘private cloud’ didn’t really exist. Back then (and it feels aeons ago) we grappled with ‘The Cloud’ vs ‘On Premise’ and I recall, at the time thinking that anything that is not publicly addressable is not really cloudy. But it would seem that a lot of the enablers of the cloud vision are, or should be, present in private data centres operated by large enterprises. An enterprise would like to have the benefits of the automation that cloud technologies offer, the scalability, elasticity and so on, without necessarily moving out of their data centre. And so the ‘private cloud’ term started becoming more widely used, particularly by vendors who are in the business of selling solutions to enterprise data centres.
So Amazon, which is generally considered enterprise unfriendly (after all they sell books, not expensive hardware for data centres), has really opened up Pandora’s box of cloud definitions with their move into the ‘private cloud’ space. The big vendors don’t seem to have reacted yet, and I don’t think they will. After all, the strategy of up-and-coming vendors that already have an enterprise foothold is to convince their customers to buy into ‘private clouds’ in their own, on-premise data-centres and then once they were used to the idea, pitch the idea of moving parts of their virtualised environment onto the cloud and, by keeping it on a VPN, it remains ‘private’. So the Amazon offering is the end point of exactly what the traditional IT vendors were heading towards in a couple of years so it is going to be difficult (or stupid) to shoot them down.
I can picture (but will refrain from suggesting) some pro-private vendors and marketers that are probably seething at Amazon’s cheekiness and are really pissed that Amazon has come along and hijacked a definition that they have been crafting so carefully for the last few months. Well, that is what you get when building a marketing strategy around a malleable term such as ‘private cloud’ in a market that hasn’t settled on definitions yet. Good luck trying to convince your market that there is a difference between ‘Private’ and ‘Virtual Private’.
The interest and positioning around definitions of cloud concepts is only of interest to a few of us – my wife has stopped reading my blog because most people (rightfully) cannot get excited about definitions of cloud terms. But what interests me about Amazon’s move is that they really are pushing the definition of what cloud is and opening a real can of worms. From an application architecture perspective we worry very little about what is private or public, and where exactly the application runs – we are more interested in latency, bandwidth and other things that directly affect how our applications perform. Security specialists and lawyers may be more interested than application architects as exactly where the data resides is of interest to them, but it doesn’t fit in easily with any easy definitions of the cloud. Currently enterprises that are non-cloud are running on hardware that is not owned directly by them – maybe their DR site is in a co-location and even if the servers themselves are directly owned, the networking hardware may not be. So getting into an argument with Amazon that the Virtual Private Cloud is not private means answering a whole lot of other difficult questions.
Ultimately the cloud is doing what I hoped – turning the market upside down and putting business in control of their IT solutions. The internal IT people and their big vendor buddies can debate the pros and cons of private, public, virtual, on-premise or off – in the meantime business will whip out their credit cards and go rogue by building solutions on a vendor (Amazon) that can give them what they need… now.
PS: On 4 September 2009 (next week) I am cycling 200 miles in 3 days from London to Paris for charity and I need the readers of my blog to help raise some money for a good cause. So please go and donate over here.
Simon Munro
@simonmunro