UPDATED 23:11 EDT / AUGUST 26 2012

Guest Post: Welcome to the Cloud Laundromat

By Rodney J. Rogers – CEO of VirtuStream@rjrogers87  

I really hate most large institutionalized conferences. Yes, I get the networking dynamic and the exposure to new products and services, however, I think on a net basis the general productivity loss (at least for service providers) trumps the upside. It’s simple: Too many sellers, too few buyers. All service providers rationalize the marginally efficient use of time and resources to attend. Why? At least partly because all the industry analysts and reporters are there!

One of the most entertaining aspects of this week’s VMworld, however, will be walking through the exhibition hall and soaking up all the “cloud washing” by the various service providers that have “paid to display” – i.e. the assertion of fantastically differentiated, earth shattering, über cloud services. In fact, you’ll have at least a few hundred companies claiming to be “the best” at these things with an all-to-common marketing veneer that looks like it was painted on by one massive paintbrush dipped in… Ok, I will stop now.

This is really not about VMworld, per se, as I could be writing this around any major commercial technology conference. The cloud washing juggernaut does not discriminate against, nor pause for, anyone.

Who’s in the Cloud Laundromat?

Well, everyone claims being dynamic, scalable, multi-tenant and on-demand.  But strangely there’s a wide range of the ‘best’ cloud solutions out there:

At one end, you’ll have certain legacy managed hosting and/or even colocation providers that have simply implemented a standard VMware software stack sitting on top of branded gear, touting; “We have the best cloud in the world”. Best? No. Differentiated? Nope.

Further up the chain, you’ll have some big carriers (especially now in the wake of a few notable acquisitions) that sell “outsourced virtualization” (i.e. linked blocks of VMs that often add up to full virtualized hosts) that do leverage some principles of multi-tenancy, touting; “We have the best cloud in the world”. Better maybe, but not truly scalable.

Of course you’ll also have the “Virtualization 2.0 in a rack” hardware appliance guys who have pre-assembled cloud blocks of compute/network/storage claiming they are “the way”. Cloud in a box, if you will. Think: Expensive, “sorta-cloud-101”.

At the very other end, you’ll have the public cloud players who offer truly automated and elastic commodity clouds running on unbranded gear.  Their view is that if you don’t modernize by rewriting your applications to be “cloud aware”, well then you don’t really need a cloud. Call us back when you rewrite your apps, they may say, case study: Netflix. Hmm… “Just” rewrite all those legacy applications that represent 75%+ of the IT workload spend of traditional Fortune 500 businesses today? Really?

Cloud Washing , as We Know it, is About to End

The fact is that within all this cloud washing, there are some really great public, private, and virtual private cloud solutions that are delivering unique IP and capabilities to this rapidly evolving market. What is a Fortune 500 enterprise IT buyer to do?

A few years ago the primary debate was public cloud versus private cloud. A more recent religious war erupted over APIs and API standards. Now it is a lot about AWS versus the OpenStack, Cloudstack and vCloud ecosystems, the role of the larger tech OEMs and carriers in the mix, and the emergence of younger hybrid cloud innovators (where I would place my company, Virtustream).

I do believe it is all going to get a lot tougher for the cloud washers, though. Right now. I’ve seen enterprise buyer cloud IQ increase dramatically over the last 12 months. That’s great news for the enterprise, who gets continually beat up for being late to “get it”, and really bad news for the washers.

Sexy? Elastic? Yes! But Don’t Forget Those Wall-flower Apps.

Truly complete cloud solutions need to be able to deal with the complex heterogeneous nature of large traditional enterprise environments. A “one size cloud” does not fit all. It needs to be able to handle both the brave new world of web-scale applications and of traditional legacy applications.

Any true cloud solution has to be able to effectively deliver dynamic scalable infrastructure for modern-day sexy “scale-out” applications (scaling up whenever intelligent “cloud-aware” applications require it, and shrinking back when they don’t). But truly complete cloud solutions also need to deal with those not-so-sexy legacy applications. It’s where the highest workload spend is today. No, you should absolutely not discount cloud solutions here.

Yes, these all legacy apps will likely all be rewritten eventually to be “cloud-aware” over time. No, that will not all happen in the next 5 years. The Fortune 500’s of the world must deliver legacy application performance on fundamentally different infrastructure dynamics than those of today’s high-flying consumer web 2.0 companies. Forget “best efforts” infrastructure SLAs here. IaaS and cloud management software needs to deliver application SLAs by assuring full processing throughput. Furthermore, dynamic infrastructure sizing will need to happen via engineering those “cloud aware” triggers that don’t exist inside those dumb legacy apps into the infrastructure delivery mechanism itself. Yes, it can be done.

So the cloud washing checklist for the discerning enterprise buyer has evolved: Proper automated self-service options? Yes, always. Pooled resource sharing? Of course. Relentless (even silicon-level) security? Absolutely. Compliance? You bet. Public cloud or private cloud? Likely a combination of both. On-premise or off-premise? Again, potentially both. Opensource better than proprietary software? Maybe or maybe not, depends on the use-case. Low-touch managed services models better than higher-touch ones? I have seen the latter actually work better in the larger enterprise supporting sophisticated cloud environments (I know, cloud blasphemy!)

Here it is: It all depends on the varying enterprise application use-case requirements within overall enterprise landscape being addressed. Your cloud solution has to pragmatically and efficiently fit the varying nuanced requirements of the landscape, not the other way around. The large complex compute environments that run Fortune 500 companies today are basically the place that technology idealists go to die.

Cloud Washing is Dead, Long Live Cloud Washing

We are human beings, after all. Worse yet, service providers.

After the reality sets in that one can no longer cloud wash and really get away with it, I predict the emergence of a more sinister type of cloud washing – hybrid washing, and then after that, federation washing.

Federation will involve the complexities of sharing workload capacity across legal entities and different clouds. Think cell phone roaming and a new accretive type of community cloud where non-competitive participants share workload capacity in a supply chain format. This will go well beyond the connecting API, and into normalization of workload attributes and economics. It will be complex stuff, but the technology will get there.

I’m putting this post in the bank for VMworld 2013. I should be able to use it then for an inevitable intellectual joust with some future faux-federated cloud provider.


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