Thomas J. Bittman
Private cloud computing is rapidly moving up the Gartner hype cycle. In terms of raw market hype, I think we’ll peak late this year. VMware’s “Redwood” won’t be the only announcement – every major infrastructure vendor in the planet will likely put “private cloud” in their announcements, their marketing, their product names.
So before we get too overwhelmed with private cloud computing mania, what’s going to be real, and what isn’t? How will private cloud computing be used?
Just like early virtualization deployments, development and test is the favorite starting point for private cloud computing. Take out the middle-man, and provide a self-service portal for developers to acquire resources. Manage the life cycle of those resources, and return them to the pool when the developer is done. Dev/test is a perfect starting point, because there is a need for rapid provisioning and de-provisioning.
What’s next?
I think the next logical place will be the computing sandbox. This is a place for production workloads that need to be put up quickly – a stand-alone web server, a short-running computational task, a pilot project. “I need it NOW.”
The sandbox will especially be the place to put a workload prior to full production deployment internally, but when it needs to go up fast – and when external deployment (in the “public cloud”) isn’t appropriate for one reason or another.
Sandboxes can have different operational rules than normal production workloads. For example, perhaps it is a short-term “lease” and expires after thirty days. Perhaps the software is never maintained or patched during that window. Perhaps there is no backup or disaster recovery in place for those workloads. Perhaps security coverage is limited.
While a workload is running in a sandbox, the administrivia required to get appropriate approvals and fulfill organizational process requirements can be finished in parallel.
Ideally, after some period of time (like at the end of a thirty day lease), there might be a way to move the workload from the sandbox to full production, with all of the service level requirements in place.
Many large organizations will start with dev/test first, and build a sandbox next. I believe for many organizations the sandbox itself will mature and become a broader and more capable private cloud service. But there’s no rush.
Category: Cloud Virtualization Tags: cloud computing, private cloud, Virtualization, VMware
9 responses so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention The Private Cloud Sandbox -- Topsy.com April 16, 2010 at 6:52 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Toshio Matsuda, Avnet SolutionsPath™. Avnet SolutionsPath™ said: Gatner The Private Cloud Sandbox: Private cloud computing is rapidly moving up the Gartner hype cycle. In terms of… http://bit.ly/aMirHj [...]
2 James Watters April 16, 2010 at 7:28 pm
I think that you are correct that more and more technologies are emerging to make disposable computing environments faster to provision and manage–no doubt.
I was pretty surprised to see VMware’s Redwood project labeled as a pure private cloud/sandbox style tool. While that may be a simple use case for Redwood to solve, I believe their ambitions extend to large scale public clouds as well.
Overall, the whole idea of having 1 technology for developer clouds, and another technology for a different kind of private or public cloud seems opposite of the spirit of clouds in the first place–industrialization, and uniformity of supply across a diverse set of use cases and users.
3 Jon Greaves April 16, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Tom, we are seeing exactly this scenario appearing within our customer base (enterprise and federal). Another dynamic of this kind of solution is the customer favoring agility over elasticity, the cloud providing multi-tenant/multi-project support over simply using VCC/XenCenter ontop of hypervisors.
These kinds of deployments also typically have bare metal/dedicated solutions in play so enabling layer2 connectivity for enterprise apps running on baremetal or outside the cloud virtualization to burst into the cloud is another key usecase as well.
nice post…
4 The Private Cloud Sandbox Private Me April 16, 2010 at 8:48 pm
[...] here to read the rest: The Private Cloud Sandbox By admin | category: Uncategorized | tags: cloud-computing, every-major, gartner, [...]
5 Tom Bittman April 17, 2010 at 1:53 pm
James, VMware’s ambitions are certainly broader. Redwood will be used by service providers, and by enterprises. Whether VMware likes it or not, most enterprises won’t build massive private clouds day one. They start small, and that was the point of the post. But, like virtual machines, they will expand quickly.
In terms of interoperability across clouds (public-public, private-public), we simply need standards, de facto or not. If PaaS standards are realized, then I could see a faster evolution for enterprises who will develope first for their “private” PaaS, and then extend to the public cloud. But popular public cloud PaaS solutions are public only. Even Microsoft’s Azure is public only right now (.NET mods needed).
So the only serious play for cross-cloud interoperability right now is using virtual machines. VMware is trying to build both ends of the bridge. I’m sure Microsoft will be there too, in another year or so. Amazon/Eucalyptus should put more effort here, etc. VMware’s large enterprise installed base is very attractive to hosters trying to become IaaS cloud providers.
Overall, the whole idea of having 1 technology for developer clouds, and another technology for a different kind of private or public cloud seems opposite of the spirit of clouds in the first place–industrialization, and uniformity of supply across a diverse set of use cases and users.
6 virtualization.info | Microsoft is evaluating CDN, hybrid cloud model and data center sandbox features for Azure April 21, 2010 at 7:04 am
[...] training, demos, and prototype development. Again this approach, which Gartner is now calling computing sandbox, seems exactly the same delivered by CloudShare [...]
7 virtualization.info | Azure用のCDN、ハイブリッドクラウドモデル、データセンタサンドボックス機能の評価を進めるMicrosoft社（20100420-3） April 21, 2010 at 7:16 pm
[...] 3つ目の最も重要なのが、Azureを使ってマイクロインスタンス（現行の「小型」サイズよりさらに小さい）をトレーニング、デモ、プロトタイプ開発などのテスト用にホスティングする機能だ。 繰り返すが、Gartner社が「コンピューティング・サンドボックス」と呼んでいるこのアプローチは、CloudShare社が現在提供しているのと全く同じもののように思える。 [...]
8 The Private Cloud Sandbox » Welcome to privatecloud.com April 29, 2010 at 9:23 am
[...] Thomas Bittman, April 16, [...]
9 Sean Clark May 13, 2010 at 4:39 pm
“Whether VMware likes it or not, most enterprises won’t build massive private clouds day one. They start small, and that was the point of the post. But, like virtual machines, they will expand quickly. ”
@Thomas – It ain’t sexy, but you’re right. Cloud will take a similar journey as virtualization. In 3-5 years we’ll be having similar conversations about cloud as we are about virtualization today. Wondering how to get the last 20-30% of workloads “cloudified”.
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