A bit foggy on “cloud?”
One question that has popped up in some blog posts recently is whether the notion of “private cloud” is a misnomer or if it conceptually even makes sense. Some of the conversation started when Andrew Conry-Murray posted that the term “private cloud” is bunk and no such thing exists. I have to completely disagree with Conry-Murray. His dismissal of “private cloud” comes from using too narrow of a scope and too restrictive of an understanding of a “cloud’s” applicability, intent, and history.
It’s important to first understand where the term “cloud” originated, as it should really be used in a constructive approach to arriving at the definition of “private cloud” and the determination of how accurate of a term it really is. The term “cloud” originates from a scary place: network diagrams. Have you ever used Visio or a similar tool for modeling diagrams? If so, and if you’ve ever created diagrams that required some sort abstract network, you’ve undoubtedly used the “cloud icon” (which looks kind of like the dust-balls that the Road Runner would leave behind when being chased by Wiley Coyote). This icon was used to denote an abstract network at some responsibility boundary.
Ok, so the history of the term cloud is somewhat rooted in telephony, but we definitely adopted the icon for broader use in general network diagrams. Point being, the origins of the term “cloud”" had nothing to do with the public Internet, and I’d argue it still doesn’t. A cloud is simply an abstraction of network and resource responsibilities that one can leverage in support of some other functional tier or silo. The network diagrams that we’ve all created never restricted the use of the icon to the Internet, but rather remained open to use in any situation where you had to clump non-specific, potentially unidentifiable (but conceptually understood) resources into a dependency.
Given the history of the term and its typical usage, what makes the term “private cloud” so broken? Nothing. An enterprise can use Internet architectures to create internal, “private” resource abstractions. These are private clouds that can be used in a variety of capacities. Granted, larger enterprises are better positioned to leverage private clouds, but that doesn’t mean smaller enterprises won’t build them as well.
All this said, I do distinguish the Cloud, as a proper noun, from a general cloud. The proper noun Cloud should be used to identify the public internet.
How do you feel about the term private cloud? Does history not matter when it comes to best understanding the term? Let me know!
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
Thanks for this post, Sinclair! An historical perspective is always interesting and often illuminating, as was the case here. Your position on this is aligned with mine (hence, I like it!) What you did not get into is the “client” side (if that term is still valid) of all this, and why “private cloud” seems both valid and important. To me what is important is that computing resources can be leveraged by anyone with a browser. I can ‘rent a service by the unit’ rather than have dedicated resources provisioned on my behalf. This is, for me, the essence of the whole ’2.0′ thing, with Cloud (and cloud) being part and parcel.
Vaughan, good point regarding the client perspective. Ultimately, whatever definition sticks needs to be agreeable to those on the client side. I’ sure that so long as $ are involved, providers are happy to call ‘Cloud’ whatever those paying want to call it!
I loved the way Larry Ellison went mental about the term ‘cloud computing’ did you see the video about his comments?
I am a big fan of SaaS and believe Microsoft, SAP and Sage are leaping into that direction. Keyword being recurring revenue and expanding license fees as users and company grow.
Itscontrol enjoyed the SaaS wave since its creation a year ago, since customers were not used to having to document their requirements and that no software company could provided independent consulting, customers rushed to the manageITyourself tool.
Saying this, the apps we built are on premise though, but we’re working hard to get them on SaaS as early as the end of Q3.
I know that I comment this post too late but I just read it. I can’t aggree with you opinion. I don’t think that the origins of the term matters. If you are right then most of the big companies has and had private clouds for more then 10 yrs. Owning a server farm does not make it a cloud. I believe the term private cloud was created by a sales man and if it didn’t then it should have.
Hi Yossi, I agree – owning a server farm does not mean you have a private cloud. There is a huge difference between a server farm and a private cloud. A private cloud uses virtualization and/or middleware to abstract the server farm away from the application, adding huge amounts of flexibility into the equation. A private cloud is one where consumers of internal IT resources ca “call up” infrastructure when needed. Hopefully that clears up my position.