The best of both clouds?
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The complexities of hybrid cloud deployment are threatening to undermine its advantages
The hybrid cloud model is said to combine the advantages of public and private cloud computing, but its complexity could undermine the potential benefits
When the Amazon Web Services public cloud computing offering first emerged, it sparked excitement in the industry and more than a few copycats.
The ability to scale hosted infrastructure up and down at the touch of a button suggested a future in which IT expenditure is in lockstep with demand. Some even imagined a day when organisations owned no IT infrastructure of their own.
Now, though, the many caveats to public cloud computing are better understood. Concerns about security, regulatory compliance and liability in the event of disaster, combined with a more subtle understanding of the cost implications, mean that while there is clearly a time and place for the public cloud, it is not suitable for every workload.
Meanwhile, the concept of a private cloud – a highly virtualised internal infrastructure that can be operated like a company-specific utility service – has its attractions, but on its own does not remove the need to provision infrastructure to meet peak demand. It was this characteristic that had so many organisations excited about public cloud computing in the first place.
Inevitably, a compromise has been proposed in the form of ‘hybrid clouds’. Put simply, this involves creating a highly virtualised internal infrastructure that can be augmented with public cloud resources – from one or more external providers – as and when they are needed. These resources would be integrated seamlessly and perhaps even provisioned automatically.
For the IT industry, this compromise is ideal. Customers will still need to invest in the hardware, software, services and consultancy required to build their own private clouds, but will also pay for hosted resources when they need
them most. But what about the end-user organisations? Does this compromise represent the best of both worlds, or will the cost of building and managing such a complex infrastructure cancel out any potential benefits?
Industry push
IT infrastructure suppliers clearly see hybrid cloud computing as a potential money-spinner. Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and VMware all have products designed to help organisations to extend their internal infrastructure onto public cloud platforms.
Open source infrastructure vendor Red Hat is pursuing the hybrid cloud opportunity. In September 2009 it launched Deltacloud, a system that allows organisations to tie together various cloud-based systems through a single interface. The aim is “to enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts and applications which can interoperate across the public and private clouds,” the company said at the time.
One customer that uses Red Hat’s cloud infrastructure to benefit from both internal and external resources is digital animation studio Dreamworks. “When they have to get their movies ready, they have huge requirements in terms of compute power for rendering the films,” explains Red Hat’s European general manager, Werner Knoblich.
Dreamworks meets these requirements with a combination of internal and external systems. “They have different internal clouds where they can easily move resources from one virtual cluster to the other,” he explains. “Then out of the same user interface they can go out to Amazon and just provision another 1,000 or so machines to render the film.”
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