Comments on: When to Use Cloud? Example Use Cases

By: It is all about the Applications – Private Cloud design | Applied Virtualization

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:26:48 +0000

[...] my previous blog , I said infrastructure is a means and application is the end. We need to drive the design cloud [...]

By: Steve Jin

Steve Jin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:21:13 +0000

Hi JA,

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts on the SaaS which involves much less effort on development and operation from customer side. I know some biggest companies are using SaaS in one way or the other. I also know cases in which companies insource SaaS when they get bigger and want more features that cannot be provided by SaaS vendors. Also, non core competency systems could be critical for operation like email as you mentioned.

Steve

By: Steve Jin

Steve Jin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:01:17 +0000

Hi Rodos,

Thanks for your great comment! I agree with you on that “many organizations are going to want to control their applications but maybe not the infrastructure that sits underneath it.” In my opinion, infrastructure is a mean and the application is the end. Customers can go with whatever infrastructure works the best. They should worry about it when the infrastructure cannot meet the requirement of applications, for example, insufficient IO capacity.

I think virtual private cloud is a form of public cloud which is used in a more secure way than others. It can be thought as an extension of your private cloud, depending your security requirements. It costs more and may slow down a bit because of VPN connection and stronger isolation.

Steve

By: Rodos

Rodos — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:43:29 +0000

I am glad you mentioned the dramatic workloads. I presented alongside the CTO for News Limited who extensively use Akami and AWS for scaling out news content for their major brand newspapers. It was very interesting hearing about the massive demands they have when there is major news events and multiple at the same time. They have developed a very good model to support their core business which is delivering content to Internet eyeballs to generate advertising revenue. But I can’t use this use case against you.

I still find the “avoid for anything core”, especially at the IaaS level. Customers already outsource elements of their IT systems such as carriage, network management, security. With virtual workloads moving to commodity level, the plumbing, many organisations are going to want to control their applications but maybe not the infrastructure that sits underneath it.

Do you think there is any difference here between public cloud and virtual private clouds? Or is that just semantics.

Always interesting to read your thoughts. Keep the posts coming!

Rodos

By: JA

JA — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:04:10 +0000

Hi,
I still think public cloud is the next evolutionary step to traditional hosting meaning it will largely replace managed hosting, dedicated hosting, and co-lo.

Many people use these services for large high profile production systems. For example I believe Twitter uses a managed hosting solutions.

Therefore although the above is all very valid there is more to it than that. Apart from outsourced projects all your other examples make it sound like cloud is for none critical side projects. Also you have limited Cloud Computing to IaaS and possibly PaaS, what about SaaS. For example CRM and Email are 2 areas that are not a core competency of many businesses out there yet traditional we invest lots of money in running these critical systems. If any of the current providers are good enough and meets ones criteria is another matter but again some of the biggest companies on the planet are using Salesforce and Google Apps!

Thanks,
@janaka_a