Private cloud: Strategy and tactics from the big boys

A few weeks ago I attended the Italian VMUG user conference. One of the most interesting sessions at the event was “Strategic Private Cloud”, presented by Alan Civita of Sky UK, who confirmed what is now a common trend in very large IT organisations: a strategy based on two different private clouds. Cloud is a synonym for …

[Anonymous Coward]

"Cloud is a synonym for operational agility and efficiency"

<paxman>Yeeeeeeeeeeessss</paxman>

The one common feature about the many different user group meetings I've been to over the years is that summed up by the phrase "misery loves company".

User Group is a synonym for Mutual Reassurance Society.

[Yaron Haviv]

Many will skip to containers

Enrico,

Many i talk to plan on skipping the OpenStack phase directly into micro-services and cloud-native architectures, i.e. DevOps with Mesos/Kubernetes, Dockers, ..

can see: http://www.americanbanker.com/news/bank-technology/why-tech-savvy-banks-are-gung-ho-about-container-software-1078145-1.html

OpenStack is still a IaaS cloud, not too different than VMware, just much harder to deploy, you still mess with vNICs, vDisks, .. i.e. infrastructure, people want to run elastic services, generate images from Git, and not care about a VM going down. They use VMware today for a robust IaaS and play with Docker to gain the real agility and change how they treat app lifecycle. VMware and OpenStack now run after containers to fill the gaps before someone else will.

BTW for a real AWS/GCP/Azure like cloud you need all the Platform & Data Services (can see my last blog post on that), unfortunately there are no such Enterprise alternatives yet.

Yaron

SDSBlog.com

[Pascal Monett]

"[the developer] is in charge of everything from performance down to data protection"

Given that 66% of major IT bods don't think security is a primary concern, it seems to me that this cloudy future, so rosy on paper, is going to be full of leaks.

As soon as a hacker gets to know the cloud provider security scheme, he will be in and out as he pleases with the data of all companies using that platform.

Fun times ahead.

[AbstPoolAuto]

Re: "[the developer] is in charge of everything from performance down to data protection"

''As soon as a hacker gets to know the cloud provider security scheme'' - are you suggesting this is easier than getting access to the security scheme of most in house managed corporate IT Depts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many will skip to containers - REALLY?

Hello Enrico and Yaron,

aforementioned article http://www.americanbanker.com/news/bank-technology/why-tech-savvy-banks-are-gung-ho-about-container-software-1078145-1.html is actually IMO nothing more than FUD or far from being objective at least.

Basically to run any workload you're forced to pass through IAAS layer and solve all infrastructure networking, storage and life cycle management issues. You can do it with OpenStack or move all your workloads to AWS, Azure or whatever public cloud which solves IAAS problems for you. For those who would like mix and match traditional and 'dockerized' approaches and don't want to go to public cloud, OpenStack provides enterprise grade support for both workload types.

Also statement that OpenStack is difficult to deploy and operate is nothing more than FUD or misunderstanding at least and this problem was solved long ago with project called Fuel.

OS and Container approaches:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZbebTIaS7M

https://www.openstack.org/summit/tokyo-2015/videos/presentation/why-reinvent-the-wheel-using-murano-heat-container-clustering-and-ceilometer-to-provide-auto-scaling-and-enforce-selfhealing-best-practices-in-applications

OS Installation and operation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vrt73nJt3k

Note that these projects are outdated now and IMO OS is even more affordable and competitive these days. Every new development cycle brings important improvements in OpenStack world, his is just unbelievable for me to observe how rapidly this platform matures and now is not more any beta, POC or anything like this. I'm expecting massive OS adoption in the near future.