Definitions and functionality expectations seem to be all over the board for what makes up a private vs. public cloud infrastructure solution. It seems like everywhere you look you see all sorts of defintions – particularly for private cloud.
Is a private cloud a VPC hosted on a public cloud provider’s system? Is it on-premises “cloud-type” solutions where your users are provided some self service provisioning? What happens when private cloud intermingles with public-cloud solutions?
It’s like a bad episode of an online dating game – “Today, when private and public clouds co-mingle, the results are astonishing…”
To me, a private cloud is a few of these things. A virtual private cloud (VPC) is one where your systems are logically walled off from the public servers and services offered by a provider. You can add systems to this grouping, you can apply different security to it, etc. This, to me, qualifies as private cloud because it’s not living “in the wild” at the provider.
However, to me, you can also have a private cloud on-premises. There are tools you can use to provision virtual machines, resources, tools and software for those inside your company, all with the thing people love about the cloud – the self-service and fast allocation side of things, while still being under your information systems management. This is a pretty cool technology from a geeky standpoint, but it seems that adoption has been fairly slow on this (purely anecdotal, I haven’t done research, just going from what I hear and see “out and about,” so could be mistaken).
The reaasons I’ve heard is that it flies in the face of in-house IT to provide that level of self-service. “We’re here to take care of that for them, shouldn’t we?” I get it, but I think self service can be a boon to the user community too in the right sitautions.
Those lines between public and private cloud from an end-user or (gasp!) departmental level needs fulfillment are quite grey. It used to be sort of a here or there type of thing – here on-premise or there in the cloud. But with integrated security and active directory and all of that, combined with appropriate automation and such, it’s hard to see those blurry lines.
How are you handling this? Do you provide self-service to databases, to systems, to your own services? If you are using cloud resources, do you put your database servers (either SAAS or VMs) in a private cloud, or let ’em run wild? (That sounds silly, there are still protections and firewalls and security of course) How are you approaching it?