There is a article over at The Cloud Option discussing how virtualization is not Cloud. It is summed up very well in this statement:
“Cloud/IaaS goes beyond virtualization by providing extra services for dynamically allocating infrastructure resources to match the peaks and valleys of application demand.”
I think that when people discuss the public/private cloud, this is an often understated point. Simply virtualizing your existing infrastructure with your favourite hypervisor does not mean you have implemented a private cloud within your datacenter. Cloud is about enablement, not virtualization. As ‘The Cloud Option’ says, virtualization is a valuable first step, but it is not Cloud.
From my perspective, Cloud is all about the ability to deploy and manage business services without the involvement of an infrastructure team. If you develop application X for the Cloud, given the right permissions, you should be able to provision the application into production without ever involving someone from the IT department responsible for providing the Cloud resource.
Once provisioned, you should be able to manage, maintain and scale application X without ever involving IT. Virtualization alone is never going to give you this. Cloud is about tools, and given the infrastructure requirements to deliver todays applications and services, it’s about about simple tools performing complex tasks behind the scenes. I go back to the article at ‘Cloud Option’ and, as they suggest, at a minimum the Cloud provider (internal or external) must bring: Self Service, Resource Metring & Accountability, Image Management and Network Policy Enforcement.
up.time provides great visibility into your physical and virtual assets that are a part of your Cloud strategy, by provinding deep Cloud monitoring and Cloud management, as well as traditionally deployed applications. In conjunction with our vOrchestrator integration, up.time can also provide resource automation for the scaling and provisioning of applications into the Cloud.
I think Terremark is heading down the right path with their Cloud offering, providing a complete solution to their customers with self management from the application to the virtual network and its security features. I also think that as enterprises look to push their applications and data onto the Cloud, network capabilities are going to become the real differentiator between Cloud offerings. We are at the point where virtualization at the server level is a known and pretty comodditized good. However, at the network layer there are all kinds of opportunities to provide value as part of the overall Cloud offering. From basic firewalling and load balancing to application aware layer 7 switching and deep packet manipulation, these are all capabilities that will allow Cloud providers like Terremark to differentiate themselves from one another.
Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Cloud Monitoring, Private Cloud, Terremark
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