Feb 24, 2010 by Sinclair Schuller
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!
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