To the cloud or not to the cloud?

I spent this morning on a conference call being introduced to a new storage system.  This is the first storage system that is purpose built for Virtual Machines and not to be used as general purpose storage.    I also heard about another new storage system geared towards service providers that will power the next generation of public cloud.  Then came another announcement from VMware about the launch of their new Platform as a Service offering Cloud Foundry.

Maybe it's because I work in the world of virtualization every day, or maybe it's just an idea who's time has come, but either way there is a lot of activity in the virtualization and the cloud space lately.





There are many companies betting that public cloud is the way of the future.  Certainly from a business standpoint it makes sense.  As a business owner or CEO you really need to ask yourself if investing in something other than your core competency is worth while.  Sometimes it is and sometimes it is better to work with someone who's job it is to do IT.  The trend now really looks like a shift from internal resources to public cloud.

If I was a new startup today, I would be running as quickly as I could to the promise land of public cloud.  The thought of having all the infrastructure, application and support I need to start and grow on without spending everything in my startup budget is appealing.  The real beauty of public cloud is that it starts the size you need, and scales to the size you need quickly and cost effectively.  There are also many "normal" business applications, both front and back office, that can be had from the public cloud.

Many companies these days invent their own software as their product, but worry that developing or deploying in the public cloud put's their Intellectual Property at risk.  This fear is completely unfounded.  The truth is these days, public cloud can be as safe and secure as a private data center.  Furthermore, having a development environment ready at a moments notice, a test environment you only pay for when you need it, and a production environment that scales up as your business takes off are more valuable than any amount of data center hugging is.

Now when we add in to that the public, portable, scalable development options available through multiple PaaS vendors,  we can take public cloud to a whole new level.  Imagine applications that can manage their own bandwidth, memory, cpu and connectivity needs and provision themselves to the lowest cost, most compliant providers based on pre-established criteria and you can begin to imagine what the future of public cloud computing brings with it.

We are not completely there yet.  Companies are making strides everyday to make this vision a reality.  In fact the complete vision goes so much deeper than what I described above that it is hard to put into words.  All I can say is that I drank the cloud kool-aid and it tastes great!