Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Developers often scoff at the term, dismissing it as marketing speak. Companies dont agree either. EMC, HDS, and Nasuni each have slightly different and nuanced opinions on what the cloud is exactly, and how it meshes with traditional IT. This post is the first in a series that will explain the differences between public and private clouds, but before I get into those details, Id like to address those conflicting opinions, and introduce the five key attributes of the cloud what makes it The Cloud today. First, the cloud is not a catchall term. It shouldnt be used to include the likes of Hotmail, Gmail or even Facebook. These are simply applications that are hosted elsewhere, and including them in the definition of the cloud, well, clouds things up. Hosted applications and services define the Internet. They are the Internet. Theres no need to add them to the cloud bucket. In fact, we should discard applications entirely from our definition of the cloud. That means Gmail and Hotmail, but also Bitbucket, Github, and a whole host of applications and services are out. Applications can be built on the cloud. The cloud might be the foundation of the application, and that architecture may bring certain features to that application it might not otherwise have. But the application should be excluded from the definition of cloud. Instead, we need to constrain the definition of the cloud to the foundation of applications and services. Think about what you need to build and deploy modern applications (including web applications). You need the basic components: network, storage, CPU, an Operating System, maybe a database and code. In a pre-cloud or traditional environment, your path to building a new application, no matter your role (IT, HR Department, Developer), followed roughly the same basic steps
y y y y y y
Identify needs Find the hardware resources Develop, test Acquire deployment hardware Release Buy more hardware to scale
If youre lucky, you know your exact requirements ahead of time and only buy the hardware you need. Typically, though, you dont buy or find enough and you fail at launch. Or, if youve got money, you buy too much and it sits idle and your capital expenditure rots. Theres risk and pain at every step especially when it comes to the allocation of resources. If you dont buy enough, you die, but if you buy too much, you burn through your cash. Its very hard - if not impossible - to know how and what to buy for most projects. This is hardly a new story: Overspending on IT infrastructure is almost how the industry runs. Distributors want you to spend $5M upfront on infrastructure you probably wont need. If you do, and you outstrip it, youre locked in, so they can charge you more in a few years. This is where the cloud comes in.
When Amazon first announced Amazon S3, a few other Nasuni folks and I were working at Archivas on a distributed storage archive (now called HCP or Hitachi Content Platform). At the time of the announcement, our product sold for a few hundred thousand dollars and could easily scale to petabytes of data. It was objectbased, had a REST interface, etc. the point is that it had many of the same attributes as Amazon S3 (at least on its face). Distributed storage clusters/archives werent new. The Archivas/HDS product, Centera, and a whole host of large-scale systems were on the market or being developed (EMC, HDS, Netapp, among others). There was even plenty of open source competition! In a single announcement, though, Amazon changed the game. What they did was something no one had thought of - or at least had not weaponized and sold. But in hindsight it makes perfect sense. Amazon had spent millions of dollars developing their own internal distributed object store (S3) and infrastructure and in doing so had also scaled it out too much. They had excess resources. They then made the critical decision: Sell the excess. What we didnt realize at the time was that this was the tip of the iceberg. Amazon quickly iterated the API, and began releasing other services. EC2 (compute) and others soon followed, all based on the excess foundation materials Amazon had amassed in building their giant online empire. Amazons new offering was simple to understand and easy to use. (Once they got past the SOAP API.) Not to mention that they had the account management system just sitting there. Every single Amazon customer could use it. Thats builtin critical mass! Amazon had taken the first, biggest step, into building out the cloud. They fundamentally changed the infrastructure game, though I doubt whether they knew in advance what they had unleashed. They obviously continue to be the dominant force in the cloud market. Back to the cloud itself - yes, were focused on the foundational aspects of the cloud, but I think its fair to say that the cloud as it now exists, thanks in large part to Amazon, has these core attributes:
Self-Service
This is the concept that users do not need to ask permission to allocate or free resources. They can consume resources as they need and only what they need. This allows them to keep costs low, but scale out. They do not need to involve six layers of management and IT organizations. There is no middleman.
Ease of Use
The cloud has to be easy to use. Any vendor married to complex APIs (Im looking at you, SOAP) is going to fail. A good self-service model takes into account not only sophisticated developers, but someone in a large organization just trying to get a simple task done.
Scalability
Say youre building a website that stores pictures of cats. You need the foundation or architecture that will allow you to store millions of pictures without missing a beat. Sure, youre going to start small, but youre going to want to leave room for growth. You should never discount the need for scale for what youre building.
If those five core attributes I outlined are the main focus of the cloud, public clouds add several more that ultimately set it apart from the private cloud concept. These are:
Economy of Scale
This is basically the idea that the cost of something falls as more of it is used. In the case of the public cloud, the customers costs your costs - fall as more people and companies adopt and leverage the technology. The nice thing is that the providers compete. When one cloud provider drops its prices, the others tend to follow. So, as Amazons adoption grows, the company reduces prices, and so do the rest of the providers. Consumers almost always win here. The only way public cloud companies can make this work is with systems that inherently support multitenancy aggressively (they have to put as many users as they can in the fewest resources possible). Multitenancy allows any number of users or applications to leverage the resources exposed by the cloud at once.
Domain Knowledge
No one except other vendors assumes they have the same knowledge as Amazon or Google when it comes to running large-scale clusters of machines. Amazon, Google, Rackspace and Microsoft have years of experience maintaining large pools of virtualized CPU, operating systems and storage. That combined experience allows them to run cheaper, at a much, much larger scale, more reliably and more globally than most in-house IT firms even want to.
Externally Hosted
This is a massive benefit. These public utility clouds are globally accessible because these providers have already done massive, global rollouts of their systems in many, many data centers. Additionally, they deal with the power, the cooling, and the network infrastructure. Your organization has little to no capital expenditure. Your biggest concern is the bandwidth needed to leverage these resources.
Proven Infrastructure
Perhaps this is slightly redundant given the domain knowledge and external hosting already cited, but a coworker of mine once said: We want to use the thing everyone else is using. This isnt a comment on hype. No one wants to follow the crowd off a cliff. Rather, its a reflection on the importance of stability, reliability and sustainability. A solid cloud service with a proven track record, such as Amazon or Rackspace, and hundreds of thousands of users daily has learned the hard lessons, and worked around or through them. The public cloud brings a lot to the table. Its enriching and empowering to end users, developers and companies. Theres a flip side of the cloud coin, though, and thats the private cloud. So, what is a private cloud?
When I first heard the term private cloud, I shook my head, dismissing it just as Id done with Amazons 2006 release of S3. The notion of a private cloud seemed insane, and completely against the idea of the cloud. With time, though, I started thinking that this term and the larger concept actually made a lot of sense. Private clouds are virtualized computing resources hosted within the walls of a given company or entity (such as the military, or NASA). These resources have the same five core attributes as the larger cloud, but typically dont share the additional ones outlined for the public cloud. So, private clouds offer self-service (simple APIs, a good interface), pay on demand, speed of provisioning, etc. They share the same soul as the public cloud. Now, thats fine. Its got the same soul. But you like I did might be asking yourself why, given the added benefits of the public cloud, you would opt for something like this. Again, it boils down to a series of unique features:
Hosted by You
This feature right here is almost the antithesis of everything the public cloud stands for. But to some it is very appealing. Most IT people and larger organizations have already built out large-scale infrastructures at great cost. Theyve sunk money and manpower into the effort. Theyve paid for the infrastructure, and by hosting a cloud themselves they have far more control. They can see what data goes in, who does what, etc. Its easy for them to control or push back on costly or needy individuals or groups within the organization. Their private cloud can be expanded or replaced at will. This could also be called big-C Control and you cant put a price on that when talking with larger companies.
Security
The public cloud is public. Thats a simple fact. The IP addresses - unless protected - are on a public network. Data stored in a public cloud is located on someone elses machine. The cloud provider (the host) has access to all of this data and, if its not handled properly, data can be exposed during transfer and at rest. The private cloud brings this back within your walls. You control the network, the hardware, and the flow of information. You also guarantee physical security. For large, sensitive companies out there, this is the number one concern, and one of the fundamental reasons Nasuni exists (more on that later).
Customization
You cant beat custom-built.. For large organizations with highly specialized needs, a customized deployment of either open source or for-pay private cloud software may be just the thing to bring the benefits of the cloud to your organization. The fact is that you wont see custom deployments from public cloud providers any time soon. They need to serve the 90% - users and developers not the 10% use case. Youre also self-reliant with private clouds. Youre a master of your own destiny.
Performance
This is a matter of perspective, but a selling point to many organizations. Amazon has massive pipes all over the world, so the latency between you and them is pretty low on average. Still, you cannot beat local LAN performance. Something hosted locally will always destroy something hosted on the public Internet. Now that we have detailed the attributes and strengths of both the private cloud and the public cloud, well take a break. Next up, Ill compare the two, contrasting the benefits of each (can the private cloud leverage economies of scale?), and hopefully help you and your organization make some sense of these important, but often confusing new trends. Any discussion about what you should select boils down to the features you immediately need and value most. A long-term view while useful and necessary doesnt help you solve real problems now. That in and of itself tends to turn many professionals away from the cloud because the value proposition of the cloud is frequently presented as if its all about the long run. Its made to look as if the cloud isnt capable of providing for your enterprises immediate needs. But this isnt the case at all the cloud can start working for your business today. You just need to choose the right model. You want the features that the cloud - both in public and private form brings to the table. Increased utilization, agility who doesnt want those? The private cloud stands on the concept that putting your assets in or on someone elses network is inherently risky. For organizations that have already built out huge infrastructures, staying private can be appealing from the standpoint of control, performance and security. Take, for example, this article from GigaOM on Moving Regulated Industries to the Cloud. In the piece, Paul Miller discusses how various cloud technologies can help heavily regulated industries. The private cloud is among the technologies mentioned because of the features it does bring to the table. Yet the benefits of the public cloud can outstrip the benefits of staying private. For one, getting economies of scale to work within an organization can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. By opting for public clouds, enterprises benefit from the competition between the big providers in the cloud storage space. And the fact that these clouds are externally hosted means companies can fend off unchecked file growth while avoiding the costs associated with adding or maintaining infrastructure. Greatly reduced capex and opex costs are hard to argue with. The public cloud, in fact, is akin to a utility. Just as a business pays for electricity, they might also start paying for secure, always-on storage from a public cloud company. There are benefits to both public and private, and businesses will obviously weigh the features of each differently. Yet the choice doesnt exactly have to be one or the other. In fact, it is possible to make the public cloud behave - both from a performance and security standpoint - like the private cloud. This is what weve done here at Nasuni with our cloud gateway, the Filer. We understand that there are serious, real concerns about leveraging the public cloud providers, so weve made a cloud storage gateway product thats completely secure and acts like a local device. You cut costs, yet you still maintain strong security and local-like performance. We provide the perfect model a hybrid one.
With that in mind, there are still reasons why companies might opt-out of the public cloud. The customized, self-hosted nature of private clouds could prove irresistible. Given that there are real and tangible benefits to this choice, we see no reason why the private cloud should be dismissed wholesale. Granted, we fully believe the public cloud is the future. We know it. But until that future comes, the benefits of the private cloud make it a reality, and this is why we support private clouds as well. You can stand up your own EMC Atmos system within your data center, and we will talk to it the same way we talk to Amazon S3. We treat them the same to us, a private cloud is still just a cloud. The team here at Nasuni believes in both of these concepts private and public. Our goal was to make a cloud storage gateway that accentuates the features of both and ultimately makes cloud storage public and private infinitely more functional and beneficial for end users. We make it secure, add versioning and strip away the APIs that applications and users might not understand. We span the void from traditional IT and architecture to the bleeding edge technology of the cloud. Whether youre talking about public or private, the cloud is fundamentally empowering. End users and developers become immediate masters of their own destiny. IT professionals are freed from more repetitive, mundane tasks. What you choose comes down to a series of tradeoffs. For the public cloud, you trade cost for trust. The private cloud trades trust for cost. Ultimately, the private cloud might be a transitory concept. As public clouds further mature, we will see the features businesses need in the public cloud materialize. Businesses will gradually adopt a private, then hybrid (part public, part private), and then public cloud approach. The companies large enough to sustain a private cloud might also make the same move as Amazon and start reselling their excess infrastructure. Thinking about all three of these concepts the cloud as whole, then private and public clouds can be mindbending. The cloud is a huge trend right now and not without hype. Like all trends, it is being co-opted by people and companies just trying to coast along for the ride. Despite this, the cloud is very real, and very tangible. Its also the future. Here at Nasuni, we think the Filer is a kind of glimpse into that future a hybrid technology that combines the best of private and public clouds, all for the benefit of todays organizations. Try it out for yourself, or let us know what you think about the future of the cloud in the comments below.