The content generators for the IT industry continue to harp on about cloud.
Amazon will rule the world. Anything that isn't open source is doomed for failure. Any IT group that hasn't moved to a public cloud is quaintly obsolete. On and on.
Time for a rant.
I wish some of them would spend some time in a real-world enterprise IT environment. Walk a mile in their shoes, and you'll come away with a very different perspective of today's public clouds.
Yes, Amazon is getting very big -- but it's still only a tiny fraction of global enterprise IT spend.
Yes, open source models have their advantages -- but also have their disadvantages.
And IT groups who aren't embracing public clouds aren't antiquated -- they're just being incredibly pragmatic.
After all, that's their job.
So many of the assertions you'll read about defy common sense.
Let's start with basic economics: clouds are cheaper.
Common sense dictates that assets are generally more cost-effective to own vs. rent -- if your needs are sufficiently large and predictable.
Hands up in the room, please? How many of you prefer to rent your car vs. own one?
Renting a car for your daily, predictable needs would be financially absurd for most people, unless your circumstances dictated so -- you didn't need a car that often, you needed temporary extra capacity, you're traveling far from home, your car is being repaired, etc.
How many automobiles are sold to owners vs. sold to rental companies? And when was the last time you looked forward to driving a rental car?
Moving on to the next one: the assertion that public clouds are easier to use.
For who? If you already have substantially invested in a standard way of delivering IT services at scale (processes, skills, tools, etc.) the majority of public cloud offerings are wildly incompatible with how you're doing things today.
We're not talking about simple things like provisioning and reporting, we're talking about the more serious concerns like availability, recoverability, security, compliance, problem resolution, etc. -- the day-in, day-out of what makes enterprise IT different.
Back to our car analogy.
Imagine a new kind of car with unfamiliar controls and gauges. A joystick for steering. Squeeze the handle for braking. Critical information (speed, fuel, warning lights) buried under a set of menus, or not available at all. No locks on the doors. The windshield replaced by a 7-inch screen.
Could you learn to drive it? Sure. Would you buy it? Probably not -- even if you could learn to drive it, no one else could.
Up next: the public cloud is a convenient and useful abstraction.
Maybe for users, but certainly not for the enterprise IT organizations that have a full-time career in delivering critical IT services. Most difficult IT disciplines are based on a precise knowledge of configuration and associated operational procedures.
For these people, the public cloud is -- well -- opaque. It doesn't provide the transparency they need to get their job done. Not to mention potentially missing a handful of critical features they've come to depend on.
And to round out the discussion: the public cloud gives you more agility.
Yes, this is true for the simple, day-to-day IT tasks -- provisioning a new server, etc. But try and do something moderately complex with sharp edges: test out a new failover scheme, provision and verify a new security domain, pass a compliance audit, instantiate an enterprise-class workload, etc. -- and IT is still hard, but now in a different way.
Why vCHS Is Different
Yes, I'm a VMware employee, and I have every reason to be biased, but hear me out, please ...
What appeals to me with vCHS (VMware Cloud Hybrid Service) as an attractive enterprise cloud offering is simple: it works the way the enterprise does.
Look at it from an enterprise IT leader's perspective. They've invested an enormous amount getting virtualized with VMware: implementing the technology, migrating applications, and creating new workflows and tooling.
Don't quote me on this, but people toss around the number that there are something like 40 million VMware-based virtual machines in production -- and that's not a small number.
The design point for vCHS is simple: be a compatible extension of an enterprise customer's VMware-based environment: tools, technologies and workflows. And from an enterprise IT perspective, this is something worth evaluation. Put differently, it's just an external consumption option for what the customer has already built and has running. No need to adapt to what a public cloud provider might think is a good idea.
Yes, Caveats Abound
The vCHS service has been publicly available for a comparatively short time, so it will take a while before all the evidence is in. The vCHS team has a long list of things they'd like to bring to the environment, but they're making rapid progress.
And, no, I don't think vCHS will be bigger than Amazon's AWS anytime soon. That being said, I think we're in the very early days when it comes to the cloud market. I can remember a time when many of us thought AOL was synonymous with "the internet". Things have a way of changing.
For enterprise IT groups, the choices are becoming more clear. On one hand, there are some great public cloud services, but they will force us to change the way we do things, and that's neither easy nor cheap. On the other hand, there are now more public cloud services that run the way we run: same technology, processes, tools, etc.
And that sort of choice is a good thing.
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