The debate about private clouds continue as the traditional heavyweight enterprise software providers make their big and glossy pitches for their vision of a private cloud.
So, it may come from Google, but still, it is refreshing to hear the intellectual tone that a scholar like Vint Cerf provides. Cerf is Google’s chief technology evangelist but his reflections give a sound bearing on how private and public clouds do interact.
He spoke last week at the Google Atmosphere Conference. We came across one of the discussions he had with fellow Google innovators. He repeats what we hear him say a lot. It comes down to interoperability. Private clouds are tools. Google develops tools that are distributed on the Internet. The question is how do clouds interact?
It’s a contrast to what we see with Microsoft or Oracle in its quest to sell cloud computing environments into the enterprise.
In the meantime Amazon continues its own quest to dispel private cloud computing as a myth, not a reality.
In an interview with eWeek, Adam Selipsky, vice president of AWS outlined their views:
“….Moreover, Selipsky said what people are calling private clouds come with the following drawbacks, where the customer will:
· Still own the capex…and they’re very expensive (big fixed investments)
· Not pay for what you use
· Not have true elasticity…when groups relinquish their servers, the company still owns the datacenter space and servers…and will also find that managing this supply chain will present a dilemma…will either have to significantly overprovision which is wasteful or become really expert at managing just-in-time supply-chain so there are no long waits for servers…managing a supply chain like this is really hard and takes a lot of effort and refining and keeping the status quo of long time to market is not so appealing either
· Still own the headache of managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting”
And so, the debate continues.
