Comments on: Engine Yard’s Dillon: “a private cloud is an oxymoron”

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By: Diane Mueller (@pythondj)

Diane Mueller (@pythondj) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:43:25 +0000

Here again, I’d agree with you and with John that “that IT revolutions of the past have not taken place around security but openness”.

While the cloud’s promise of elastic computing resources at scale, availability and lower cost are game-changers, it’s “openness” that will spark the revolution. An Open Cloud will revolutionize the way we think about and utilize computing resources.

“Openness” in the cloud depends on being able to move from one cloud provider to another without re-engineering or being locked into to a single provider.

Being Open is about choice, and private PaaS is about providing that choice – whether you are hosting on your internal Private Cloud, a 3rd Party Cloud Hosting provider or bursting into the Public Cloud.

Adding a private PaaS layer that runs on any cloud hosting provider or IaaS or hypervisor allows organizations to move their applications and resources to any cloud hosting provider they choose, rather than be locked into a single Public PaaS providers’ IaaS choice, deployment & pricing model and services framework.

The Open Cloud revolution is here and it’s Private.

By: visionarymarketing

visionarymarketing — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:19:50 +0000

Thanks Diane for your comment. What I understand from John Dillon’s pitch is that public cloud technology is aimed at a) moving faster b) be vendor agnostic c) work by trial and error d) outsource the infrastructure. Now I understand your point that you could have the best of both worlds, and this is what private cloud offerers like you are arguing, and that you could have the beauties of cloud technology while being more secure. We could go on debating endlessly about that subject I believe … What John is hinting at here I think it’s that IT revolutions of the past have not taken place around security but openness. And here I would have to agree. I used to work for Unisys for whom I worked on the creation of the Internet banking practice in the 1990s. At that time we were working with an Atlanta-based company which was proposing an unbeatable concept for banks entitled: “the vault”. What “the vault” was doing was basically to create a risk-free environment for banks to do business online. That’s was unbeatable – given banks’ aversion to risk – yet it didn’t work out. Consumers and bankers started experimenting with basic SSL encryption and that was that. Obviously, it’s difficult to tell whether it will also happen with cloud technology – and I hope you sell lots of private PaaS services – but at least he is making a good point.

By: Diane Mueller (@pythondj)

Diane Mueller (@pythondj) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:01:16 +0000

While I agree with John Dillon’s pronouncement that ““Cloud’s the most important change to the way we do computing since the invention of the PC” – I’d have to disagree with the comment that IT departments that are deploying Private Clouds are “just shifting the budget from one department to another”.
Private Clouds have been and are being deployed in many F500 corporation already. By leveraging IaaS layers like OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and VMWare along with Private PaaS layer like ActiveState’s Stackato or Cloud Foundry, enterprises gain all the elastic computing functionality of a Public PaaS like EngineYard without the security risks. There’s nothing “oxymoronic” about ROI and security.

To learn more about why , check out ActiveState’s CEO Bart Copeland’s blog post here http://bit.ly/whyprivate