{"id":11094,"date":"2011-03-16T12:05:14","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T12:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=11094"},"modified":"2011-03-16T12:05:14","modified_gmt":"2011-03-16T12:05:14","slug":"public-versus-private-cloud-iaas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=11094","title":{"rendered":"Public Versus Private Cloud IaaS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: in this post I\u2019ll be concentrating on IaaS (infrastructure as a service or VM hosting in the cloud).\u00a0 SaaS and PaaS are slightly different conversations.<\/em><\/p>\n

I was having a conversation on Twitter with someone that I respect yesterday afternoon about designing a private cloud.\u00a0 He made an interesting comment that got me thinking.\u00a0 A pure private cloud \u2013 which is, at its core, hosting of VMs in an internal or colo hosted environment \u2013 is a lot of work and maybe a business should consider using an existing public cloud.<\/p>\n

And you know, that\u2019s a very good point.\u00a0 You might have gathered from yesterday\u2019s post that there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to building a pure private cloud.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With all that bother and stress, why not eliminate all the effort and set up an account with something like an Amazon EC2, rackspace, or a local \u201cboutique\u201d public cloud hoster, and get instant access to a scalable, elastic computing environment.\u00a0 On the upside, you get instant access, you don\u2019t have the investment, you\u2019ve none of the risk, and your business may even get to eliminate you from the payroll.\u00a0 Say, what?!?!!?!?<\/p>\n

There are definitely times when public cloud is the right option.\u00a0 Obvious cases are when you\u2019re putting together public facing applications.\u00a0 But are there times when it\u2019s not the right option?<\/p>\n

A respected friend made an interesting point when discussing the cloud last year.\u00a0 He asked if people were happy right now with their telephone or internet service providers.\u00a0 Did they live up to SLAs?\u00a0 How did they perform when things went wrong?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I think it\u2019s fair to say that these operators tend to suck at support<\/a>, as do most service providers when we have a phone number\/email address as our contact points.\u00a0 How exactly will a public cloud provider be any different?\u00a0 Often they aren’t.\u00a0 It doesn’t take much googling to find people who have that same experience with their hosters.\u00a0 And hey – I include the “big boys” in this too.\u00a0 I may have no data to back this up, but I bet you the smaller hoster will give you better effort at support because they will value your business more.<\/p>\n

I think a big differentiator between internally and externally hosted infrastructure is the ability to get a response from support.\u00a0 If a manager needs something done internally then they can shout, threaten, cajole, etc.\u00a0 Stuff will get done when pressure is applied.\u00a0 What about external hosting?\u00a0 The rule of thumb that I\u2019m using: the bigger the hoster, the less qualified and enabled the person on the other end of the phone\/email will be.\u00a0 I know from experience that \u201ccustomer care\u201d are minimum wage and don\u2019t care.\u00a0 You can escalate to threats and that leads to a \u201cpromise\u201d of a supervisor call back (to get you off the line) or them hanging up.\u00a0 That urgent backup recovery that you can get pushed through internally in minutes may take 24 hours afterall in a public cloud.<\/p>\n

But there is an SLA there to protect you!\u00a0 You might have 99.9% \u201cguaranteed\u201d up time from the hoster.\u00a0 But that isn\u2019t a guarantee.\u00a0 It\u2019s actually a promise that the hoster will refund you part\/all of your payment for that month if they give you less that 99.9% up time.\u00a0 That might be useless if your business is relying on a public cloud for all internal operations.\u00a0 And the devil is in the details; how exactly is the SLA written in the contract and measured in reality?\u00a0 Don\u2019t make any assumptions.<\/p>\n

You might get over that SLA issue by geo-cluster your resources across many data centres.\u00a0 I know some hard core people who\u2019ll insist that you should really geo-cluster your resources between different hosters in different locations!\u00a0 That\u2019s the only guarantee of getting better uptime.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve barked about the Patriot Act and the nature of the USA politicians quite a bit in the past.\u00a0 Fact: the Patriot Act applies to all American owned<\/em> data centres (USA, Ireland, middle east, Asia) despite what some sales & marketing people say.\u00a0 If you need to comply with things like a European\/Irish Data Protection Act then you need to stay clear of those data centres.\u00a0 That also means figuring out if your hoster is colo hosted in one of those data centres.\u00a0 Sure the risks are small \u2013 but they are real.\u00a0 I was at a lecture last year where a solicitor (lawyer) stated so, even though he argued that the risk was small and was OK with that small risk.\u00a0 I\u2019d contradict by reminding people that the original draft of the Cyber Security Act (co written by Democrats and Republicans) wanted to give free access to all American hosted (anywhere) data to the US Department of Commerce.\u00a0 That got eliminated but who knows if that one sneaks it\u2019s way back again.\u00a0 That would have given the US government free access to your businesses data.\u00a0 And there are historical cases where government organisations have used their access to data (legal or otherwise) to assist native companies in competitive scenarios.\u00a0 Compliance is complicated – usually requiring the legal folks to get involved.\u00a0 You may have issues with data leaving your state\/country at all because of industry regulations, even if there are equal data protection laws in the other state\/country.\u00a0 Laws are different everywhere and different industries have different rules.\u00a0 Don’t assume anything.<\/p>\n

Sounds like I\u2019m really down on public cloud and all for the private cloud.\u00a0 Not quite:<\/p>\n