Seven elements of Cloud value: public vs private
In last week's post on
the seven elements of Cloud computing's value, I said that the simple model I put forward looked like being a nice way to compare different Cloud approaches and offerings and see what's really being offered. There's a lot of people jumping on this particular bandwagon, and a lot of the time it's not easy to see what's really going on.
In this blog entry I want to use that model I introduced last week to try and clearly demonstrate the difference between "public" cloud offerings (third party owned and managed, remote installations that you rent capacity from) and "private" cloud offerings (infrastructure that you install and own, but that implements many of the technology platform features found in large "scale-out" server farms run by public cloud providers). I'm not diving into the technology detail here, but rather showing how the value you get from each type of offering is different.
In the diagram I've drawn lines around each of the "cloud value element". Thicker lines mean that more emphasis is placed on that value element; where the value element appears fainter, the value element is de-emphasised or missing.
So, in a nutshell: public cloud offerings typically major on the strategic and economic value elements, and quite often - although the architectural value elements can be there - they're not talked about quite so much. Private cloud offerings, on the other hand, are *all* about the architectural value elements - virtualised resources, management automation, and (in some cases) self-service capacity provisioning.
Another slightly simplistic way to think about private cloud offerings is that they're basically like 21st Century mainframe computers. Built using commodity hardware, yes - but layered with virtualisation, sophisticated SLA-driven management, capacity management, billing/chargeback... this looks awfully like a mainframe (again, from a value perspective, not from a deep technology perspective).
So: public and private cloud offerings: "like chalk and cheese" (as we say here in the UK). That's not to say that one is better than the other: just that they're different, and it pays to understand the kind of value you'll receive from each.
Just like I said in my last post: I don't pretend to have all the answers here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Please let me know what you think!
Labels: business value, cloud computing, SaaS
