Transcript from the Private Cloud commercial you'll never see

Posted by Jason Bloomberg on Nov 16, 2012

Private Cloud Adoption. Scene 1, Take 1.

Action!

Business Exec — "Public Clouds are too risky! They scare me. We need to build ourselves a Private Cloud."

IT Manager — "We already have a data center. Let's turn that into a Private Cloud."

— "Wait. Our data center is chock full of junk: different brands of servers, different operating systems -- What a mess! Private Clouds run best on homogeneous hardware."

IT Admin — "OK, ditched all that old gear, bought all new. Also bought the leading virtualization platform and installed that. Is it Cloud yet?"

IT Manager — "Nope. We're missing automated provisioning (and deprovisioning), configuration, management, and metering. Let's go buy that."

— "Oops, the commercial products are mostly vaporware. Let's go open source. Plenty of options there... but that's the problem. I need a whole toolchain of open source products. And they're all half-baked."

IT Admin — "Fine, downloaded all that open source gear. Now I need to hire some Cloud infrastructure experts. Uh oh, can't find any. The good ones work for the big public Cloud providers. I offered one a huge salary and he wouldn't budge."

Business Exec — "Fine! Forget owning our own gear. Let's outsource our Private Cloud to a managed hosting provider. Hosted Private Cloud solves the expertise problem. But boy, is it still expensive."

IT Manager — "Maybe a Virtual Private Cloud [VPC] is a more cost effective option. Leverage a Public Cloud, but put my stuff on my internal network via a VPN. Best of both worlds! The expertise and economies of scale of the Public Cloud, but inside our firewall."

IT Admin — "But wait, it's still multi-tenant. My instances are sharing hardware with someone else's instances. Sorta like a public restroom, yuck! What if the next guy over is a terrorist or hacker or something?"

IT Manager — "Better ask my Cloud Provider for a single-tenant VPC. Now I finally have precisely what we need."

Business Exec — "What? Single-tenant VPCs cost ten times more than multi-tenant ones? I give up. Time for a beer."