The Wisdom of Clouds

Cloud computing is one of those operations models that has already started to disrupt the way in which everyone consumes software.

It is also starting to have an effect (albeit tiny right now) on the way in which people and organizations consume (or don't consume) hardware. Cloud computing has become a part of the core information technology "fabric" of many.

Cloud computing does, however, generate more than its fair share of disagreement and debate. Vendors, customers, bloggers, twitterers, and even consumers have spend many thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of words, and millions of dollars trying to convince the world that their view of cloud computing is "the one." Meanwhile, thousands of other very smart people are questioning the core assumptions on which cloud computing's value proposition rests.

You would think this dissent would be detrimental to the adoption and growth of cloud computing, but it's not. Partially that's for the relatively lame reason that every new definition and every new "must-have" feature expand the possibility of what cloud computing is...thereby growing the term "cloud computing" through a sort of linguistic acquisition strategy.

However, it is also in part due to the fact that these debates are spurring a huge amount of brain power to focus on some really difficult-to-solve cloud-related problems. The tension created by disagreement and debate in the cloud computing marketplace is spurring entrepreneurs, vendors, and even individuals to achieve their independent visions of what could be. Tension drives innovation, in this case.

Let me give you three examples of what I am talking about. These are probably the three most important examples of how disagreement is driving technology road maps industrywide. Some of these disagreements are clearly self-serving--established systems vendors protecting their markets while enthusiastic entrepreneurs attempt to redefine the markets outright. Some are just different ways of seeing the same subject, but with profound effects on the choices made by vendors and individuals on each side of the debate.

Consumer and small/midsize business versus enterprise

One of the biggest sources of tension among those that debate cloud computing definitions is the difference between the needs of individuals and small/medium businesses (SMB) versus those of their larger enterprise counterparts.

The former is looking to minimize cost and complexity as much as possible by eliminating the need to own things. Consumer/SMB is a market in which providing service through standardized devices reigns supreme, and the requirement to own anything other than basic access devices--laptops, Netbooks, smartphones, and the like--is detrimental. This marketplace sees the issue as outsourcing as much information technology as possible and is willing to place a high level of trust in providers to achieve that.

Enterprises, however, tend to be much more concerned maintaining their existing investments in IT while gaining a return on investment for new spending on new technologies or processes. A tremendous amount has been spent on making IT a trusted resource (though clearly with mixed results). Enterprises won't move forward on cloud unless they can maintain that level of trustworthiness without excessive expenditure.

So the consumer/SMB market is trying to drive the enterprise towards pure IT as a service, and the enterprise is trying to get cloud providers to up their game in security, control, service levels, and compliance. All are very good for cloud customers as a whole.

Public cloud versus private cloud

Closely related to the problem of how to run IT is where to run it. And by running it, I don't necessarily where the hardware is running, but where controls that define "the cloud" are maintained. Who owns the systems that manage the cloud and that define things like access rights, available software images, and network service configurations?

This is essentially the heart of the debate about how much service is provided by IT--how much cloud must be on the Internet for it to be cloud. Those who believe "private clouds" are unnecessary generally believe that you can get everything you need from your public cloud provider. Take Amazon Web Services, for instance. Using its console, its messaging infrastructure, its data stores, and so on, many developers are arguing that there is little reason to build and operate new applications anywhere else.

The argument for private clouds, however, is generally based on the risks inherent in external public clouds--things like lock-in, data ownership, regulatory concerns, security, etc.--as well as the alleged ability of private clouds to provide a smoother migration path to external clouds than going straight to public clouds today.

So, the public cloud crowd is pushing internal IT and individuals toward using third-party services to replace capital intensive IT, while the private cloud crowd is pushing cloud service providers to see interacting with existing IT infrastructure as an enabler for cloud adoption. Again, both are good for cloud customers.

Open source versus proprietary

While the previous two arguments have been about how and where to operate IT, this debate is a little different. It is about software technology, and it is actually about much more than cloud computing. On the surface, it's the same old "free versus commercial" debate. But when you dig down from a cloud perspective, you find nuances that will be critical to the future form of the cloud.

You've probably read about the debate regarding whether cloud computing is the logical conclusion of open source. Many open source companies note that in order to profit from open source, they must be exceptional service businesses. As cloud computing is all about service delivery, it is a natural model in which to sell open source services.

That argument, while critical, isn't the whole story, however. The other side of the coin is the debate about whether one can build competitive cloud services using anything other than open source. Most of the leading clouds available today are heavy users of open-source software, and many of the most compelling server images in Amazon's image library are based on open source.

Folks like Microsoft and VMWare, however, would beg to differ and are working furiously to prove to the market that their value add is worth the cost of their software. The argument is that these companies can pay for innovation and for a partner ecosystem that drives new business and have the customer relationships to work through long-term cloud deployment issues.

Here, the open-source community is playing a critical role in driving a new business model for software delivery (free software, for-fee service), while the so-called "proprietary" platforms are building ecosystems that push open source to continually reinforce its value to developers.

In the end, while I have preferences in each of these debates, it is impossible to declare any winners at this point. And that is good, as our constant testing of each others' principles will lead to an ever-increasing richness in cloud computing offerings for years to come.

IBM launched late Monday a new portfolio of products and services for the enterprise cloud computing market, which the company claims builds on lessons learned from earlier cloud initiatives.

Targeted at providing standardized platforms for specific computing workloads, the products and services, launched under the Smart Business and IBM CloudBurst monikers, aim to change the way IT organizations build and deliver IT services.

"Cloud is an important new consumption and delivery model for IT and business services. Large enterprises want our help to capitalize on what this model offers in a way that is safe, reliable, and efficient for business," Erich Clementi, general manager of enterprise initiatives at IBM, said in a statement. "Today's Smart Business announcement demonstrates that we take this responsibility seriously with cloud investment and solutions targeting the early opportunity."

I spoke with Dennis Quan, director of autonomic computing at IBM, and asked him to break the announcement down with a little more detail. Quan started by noting that IBM has been pursuing cloud and autonomic computing initiatives for some time now and that these initiatives have taught the company lessons that were invaluable in developing Smart Business.

"For instance," said Quan, "new workloads like large-scale business analytics and information processing are driving new specialized approaches to computing."

Quan noted that standardizing these approaches, through automation and service management, is critical to meeting new IT demands.

Initially, IBM is focusing on two core workload types in the Smart Business offerings: development/test and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). According to Quan, the company will expand the list of workload offerings over the coming months and years.

Quan highlighted three delivery models for Smart Business cloud products and services:

• Public cloud. IBM will provide its Smart Business portfolio as software services delivered directly from its IBM Cloud data centers located around the world.

• Private cloud services. For Smart Business workloads, customers can engage IBM Global Services to assist them in building cloud computing infrastructures within their own data centers.

• CloudBurst private cloud infrastructure. Initially only available for development/test workloads, IBM will offer a 42U data center rack of pre-installed and configured hardware and software as a "drop-in" private cloud option.

Data Center Knowledge had some more details about the CloudBurst rack:

The basic CloudBurst package includes:

• 1 42U rack
• 1 BladeCenter Chassis
• 1 3650M2 Management Server, 8 cores, 24GB RAM
• 1 HS22 CloudBurst Management Blade, 8 cores, 48GB RAM
• 3 managed HS22 blades, 8 cores, 48GB RAM
• DS3400 FC attached storage
• IBM CloudBurst service management pack
• IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager v7.1
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring v6.2.1
• IBM Systems Director 6.1.1 with Active Energy Manager; IBM ToolsCenter 1.0; IBM DS Storage Manager for DS4000 v10.36; LSI SMI-S provider for DS3400
• VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 U4; VMware ESXi 3.5 U4 hypervisor

James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research, told me that IBM has an advantage here.

"IBM came to these solutions from a point of credibility based on conversations they started over a year ago," said Staten. "Many other systems vendors haven't done that, and it could hurt them in the long term."

Staten also noted, however, that IBM has chosen to handle the public cloud elements of Smart Business entirely on its own, choosing to compete with service providers rather than partner with them. This could put IBM into direct competition with some large customers, such as telecommunications companies and large hosting providers, according to Staten.

The Smart Business services are available now, while the IBM CloudBurst system will ship Friday.

Ten years after the creation of Salesforce.com, the future of cloud computing is not in doubt; it is just being heavily debated. Two opposing views of how cloud computing will play out--especially enterprise cloud computing--are making the rounds among thought leaders and customer decision makers alike. Interestingly, there is enough to question about both approaches that a third option may, in fact, gain importance.

What all sides agree on, however, is that some form of cloud computing is coming your way. As always, the devil is in the details.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's "pull no punches" supreme leader, represents one of the debate's extremes. At "Whose Cloud is it Anyway?"--a cloud-computing roundtable put on by TechCrunch recently--Benioff stated (the emphasis is mine):

(Microsoft was) a company that...had a lock on the entire industry in terms of innovation, and was able to hold it through a monopoly. So, that is really broken down through a new, next generation paradigm, which is cloud computing; which is no software, no hardware, don't hire anyone, just sign up to these various cloud platforms and pick the flavor that is appropriate for your application.

In other words, it's not cloud computing to Benioff unless the IT department doesn't have to directly handle any form of technology beyond a browser or perhaps an SSH terminal application. This is the very definition one would expect from the leader of possibly the world's biggest software-as-a-service provider.

It is a call to jettison traditional IT altogether, and focus efforts on leveraging the work of professional providers of IT applications, platforms, infrastructure, and services. By this definition, it is indeed a complete change in IT paradigm.

This view is echoed by the current Wikipedia page for cloud computing, as originally authored by Sam Johnston:

Cloud computing is Internet ("cloud") based development and use of computer technology ("computing"). It is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.

The 'internal cloud'
At the other end of the spectrum are those who believe the road to cloud computing begins at home. The starting point for any enterprise with existing IT infrastructure investment, according to this camp, is an "internal cloud." An internal cloud applies the concepts of cloud computing (on-demand resources, pay-as-you-go pricing, and the appearance of infinite scalability) to resources wholly owned by the enterprise consuming the service.

There is no doubt that it is a view expressed by much of the traditional IT industry, but there are other voices out there as well pointing out the value of providing multitenant, on-demand, at-scale architectures to internal customers. Internal clouds are appealing to IT departments at many levels, though obviously they are not going to provide the economies of scale that public clouds will offer over time. (For a really good explanation of why large public clouds will dominate the next generation of IT, see the University of California at Berkeley paper titled "Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing".)

The strength of the "own nothing" argument is difficult to miss. Benioff put it very well. Don't spend money up front on things that aren't core to your business. Get them as "on-demand" services, instead, and pay for them only as you consume them.

The benefits of internal clouds, however, are a little more subtle. Most proponents will point to the inability of most public clouds to support legacy applications, while internal clouds can be built to handle old and new applications alike. Perhaps the most pervasive argument, however, is that internal clouds allow you to maintain control over security, service levels and regulatory compliance in a way that public clouds are not yet able to offer.

So, what is an enterprise to do? Choosing an "own nothing" approach, like any other paradigm shift, is extremely disruptive and requires a major overhaul or outright replacement of existing IT software assets.

On the other hand, choosing an "internal cloud" approach really doesn't gain the full benefits of public cloud computing offerings. With much smaller scale, the economics are not in internal cloud's favor. As this year and the next progress, I would expect to see it less and less justifiable to rely solely on an internal cloud.

The 'private cloud'
The term "private cloud" is becoming associated with a third option--an option that has fundamental implications to the way in which enterprise customers will approach cloud computing:

A private cloud consists of IT resources under the control of the enterprise consuming it. Those resources may be owned by the enterprise, consumed from a public cloud provider, or some combination of the two. The only requirement is that the resources be under the direct control of the customer under a unified management system, as opposed to each separately consumed offering being individually managed through the interfaces provided by their respective owners.

Many of you may be thinking "hey, that's just the definition of a hybrid cloud", but there is an important, though subtle distinction to understand.

• A hybrid cloud is the use of both public and internal cloud capabilities to meet the needs of an application system.
• A private cloud meets the needs of an application system by any combination of public and internal cloud resources--and that combination can change moment by moment.

Private clouds, by this definition, overcome the "rewrite everything" effect of "own nothing" cloud computing. On the other hand, they provide the degree of trust that enterprises were seeking from internal clouds, including the ability to change the mix of cloud services consumed completely at their own discretion.

In the end, I think the debate will evolve away from "own nothing" vs. "internal clouds", with the latter being replaced by "private clouds." Then, over time, supporters of the "own nothing" vision will come to realize that private clouds give them a direct route to migrating all application workloads from wholly owned infrastructure to public clouds, achieving their vision.

Meanwhile, the enterprise continues to operate with the perception that everything is running in their own data centers, under their complete control. In the end, I think that is the factor that will make private clouds the winning enterprise cloud computing model in the years to come.

So, which is it for you? Will you be taking Benioff's advice and cease to directly purchase software and hardware? Will you play it conservative and insist on turning your own resources into a cloud before venturing out in force to the public cloud?

Will you leverage both approaches as makes sense, a la David Linthicum's frequent advice? Will you pushing the boundaries of what you call your IT resources to include third party services, yet tie it all together within one "trust boundary"? Where do you fall in the great cloud computing debate 10 years after the creation of one of its bellwethers, Salesforce.com?

See also:
• Salesforce.com: Pondering the next 10 years
• Cloud computing: How we got here

You can follow James Urquhart on Twitter.

Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge noted an excellent response by my former Cassatt colleague, Jay Fry, to Andrew Conry-Murray of InformationWeek and Eric Knorr of InfoWorld, who contend that there is no such thing as a private cloud.

Jay's response is excellent, and I absolutely concur. However, I get so frustrated with these "its gotta be off-premises" arguments that for some time now, I've been trying to figure out a quick and dirty response I can fire off whenever such "puritanism" comes into play.

On Monday, in response to Rich's tweet about his post, I came up with a tweet that sums up my position as succinctly as I think I can put it. Here's the tweet: