Last week, we discussed some common ground around what the Cloud should offer. Now let’s go with an analogy that I may just pile drive in to the ground by the end of this, but that I think is appropriate as we talk about types of clouds. And that is utilities. More specifically, let's talk power/electricity.
1. Public Cloud
Unless you live in the remote Western outback, odds are that you get electricity from your local power company. You don't need to know how the utility company generated power or even how they delivered it to your home. You just know when it's there and when it's not. As a customer of cloud services, this works in a similar fashion.
You don't need to know, or totally care, about how your cloud provider's servers are configured, what the brand is, where they're physically located, or the name of the system administrators that keep it running. You will generally just care that it's there. Whether it's gmail/Google Apps, Office 365, or even if you are savvy enough to spin up your own servers on Amazon Web Services, you just don't need to know what is making all of that cloudy goodness happen. This is the public cloud.
However, if you’re a large enough company and are making a big move from housing your servers locally and onto the cloud, you'll be asking about all of the stuff most people don't care about when they use a hosted service. For most businesses, though, it's more about brand recognition (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) than grilling potential providers about their infrastructure.
2. Private Cloud
A private cloud – which is generally used by large organizations with a well-qualified IT staff – is the equivalent (to return to our utilities metaphor) of running your own power generation operation.
Using the same or similar technologies as the HPs, Googles, Microsofts and Amazons of the world, these businesses build out the network, servers, software and processes to deliver a similar set of services and characteristics internally. This is not for the light-hearted (or light-walleted) and very much like building your own power plant. The advantage is you get all of the benefits of cloudiness with all of the control that many organizations require or desire.
Just to add to the confusion, there is such a thing as a hosted private cloud, which may sound like it should be called a hybrid cloud, but it's not. You basically still run on a large cloud platform, but many more mechanisms keep your services separated from public services. You might need a VPN connection to get into your hosted private cloud.
3. Hybrid Cloud
No. This isn’t a Prius with a WiFi connection. That said, you have probably estimated that this combines public and private cloud services. (In this case, private cloud is used as you've built your own in-house cloud). This kind of setup offers the best of both worlds in that you can move services that may not be as critical (or super secret) out to a Public Cloud provider and back as your own workloads require.
Another common use of a hybrid cloud is for backup and recovery, as well as archiving. Many companies today rent rack space in a data center, invest in another pile of hardware and set things up so that if their main office (or primary data center) were to have an issue they can continue to operate from that backup data center. By deploying a private cloud and enabling it to talk and move services seamlessly to a public cloud provider, they get a previously unheard of level of resiliency at a relatively low cost.
I almost forgot to whip out the power analogy (you know you would miss that). This is similar to having some solar panels that you use to cut down on your power bill a bit, but you still need the extra boost on a cloudy (pun intended) day and occasionally might even generate enough to sell back.
4. Cumulonimbus Cloud
Ok, this isn't really a thing unless you're into the weather.
I'm going to sign off for now, but I hope I've set us up with a common understanding of the cloud. Future posts will discuss different cases for the small, medium and large businesses, as well as myths and myth-busting.
In the next few weeks, our CTG team will be building our own private cloud, using HP Helion OpenStack on our Lab BladeSystems and 3PAR Storage. It's going to be a fun ride! Keep following us on social media to follow our journey.
Jeff Garell is a co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.
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