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<p class="MsoNormal">It is no mystery the buzzword of the year is “cloud computing”.<span> </span>According to Gartner, it is at the top of mind for CIOs, but at the same time, it is probably the most confusing and misunderstood topic.<span> </span>Vendors, hardware or software, aren’t helping matters by publicizing everything as “cloud ready” or “cloud aware”, especially for products that have nothing at all to do with cloud computing.<span> </span>After a simple explanation of cloud computing, I’ll introduce you to the three basic types of cloud computing and how they are different.<span> </span>I’d like to touch on VMware’s cloud strategy, as well.<!--more--></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">I have to admit, I’m just as guilty as some of the vendors and was probably causing more harm than good when talking to customers about cloud computing. <span> </span>It wasn’t until a few weeks ago when I was working the booth at a hardware manufacture’s trade show with a colleague at VMware that the light bulb went off for me.<span> </span>I had a customer come up to me and ask, “What’s the difference between virtualization and cloud computing”.<span> </span>I went into my typical marketing speech about how cloud computing is a different way of doing IT; it’s not a destination, but a journey, etc, etc.<span> </span>And about halfway through, my friend stopped me.<span> </span>“You’re making this way too difficult and look how confused this poor man is”, he said.<span> </span>“I can sum up cloud computing in two words, ‘self-service IT’”. <span> </span>I can’t be that simple, but it really is.<span> </span>End-users requesting resources and having them automatically provisioned, but based on standards that IT implements.<span> </span>Essentially, self-conception of resources, delivered on demand.<span> </span>This gives IT the ability to focus more on new technologies and making the business more competitive, while at the same time, not spending the majority of their time and money on day-to-day mundane tasks.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">When you think about it, cloud computing is no different than your home phone service.<span> </span>When you pick up the phone, you don’t care how the underlying technology works or where your call gets routed through.<span> </span>All you care about is when you pick up the receiver, you get a dial tone and at the end of the month, you get a bill for using the phone company’s service.<span> </span>It may sound easy, and it should be, from an end-user perspective, but there is a lot that goes on in the background that helps facilitate it.<span> </span>I’d like to push out those exact technologies and cover them in future posts, but rest assured, security plays a big part.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">We see three basic types of clouds out there today, Application, Platform and Infrastructure.<span> </span>Application Clouds are sometimes referred to as Software as a Service.<span> </span>These are your Google Apps, Salesforces.com and the like.<span> </span>On the plus side, they’re pretty inexpensive to use and all the application development work has been done up front, but they’re limited in customization and integration into your existing corporate applications.<span> </span>In the event you want to choose a different application or provider, in most cases you won’t be able to take your data with you or will be in a proprietary format.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Platform Clouds are probably the least talked about and are more focused on delivering a software development environment and runtime as a service.<span> </span>With this offering, a consumer would develop an application using this service and then utilize the runtime environment to deploy the application.<span> </span>Examples of this environment are Google AppEngine, Spring Source and the Windows Azure Platform.<span> </span>On the plus side, it does help speed up application development and get developers the platform they need to develop on quickly, but the platform and runtime are often not compatible with existing applications and need to be re-written for the new platform framework.<span> </span>Also, just like in the case of Application Clouds, not all Platform Clouds are compatible with each other and applications will need to be re-written if you need to move provider to provider.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">The last type of cloud computing is focused on providing the most general solution, basic infrastructure as a service. These solutions provide storage, networking and computing capacity as a service to the consumer, sometimes in very high granularities of billing such as hourly.<span> </span>A vast majority of these solutions are based on virtualization.<span> </span>Sometimes you’ll hear these referred to as elastic compute clouds.<span> </span>These are your Amazon Web Services, Terremark, and Mosso’s of the world.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Any three of these clouds can be labeled as Private or Public.<span> </span>A Private cloud is typically behind a corporate firewall and is intended for a limited, pre-determined set of users.<span> </span>A Public cloud is accessible over the Internet and is intended for general consumption.<span> </span>There is also this notion of a Hybrid cloud.<span> </span>A Hybrid cloud is when two clouds have the ability to “mesh” together because they are both based on a common infrastructure platform, like vSphere.<span> </span>This will give customers the ability to move workloads from their Private cloud to the Public cloud when they may not have the resources available internally to support an application at peak load.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">So how does this all fit in to VMware’s overall Cloud Strategy?<span> </span>At a high level, VMware’s acquisition of Zimbra and Spring Source will help fill in the Application and Platform Cloud space and are also conversations for another blog.<span> </span>In the Infrastructure Cloud, VMware sees customers starting to build out their private cloud today while Service Providers build out the Public Cloud, all on a common infrastructure platform, vSphere.<span> </span>VMware’s cloud strategy is built around vSphere and virtual machines.<span> </span>If you think about it, this makes complete sense.<span> </span>Because of hardware independence and encapsulation that are inherent to virtual machines, I can move my applications (i.e. virtual machines) seamlessly from my Private to a Public cloud, without having to re-write an application or lose my data.<span> </span>Also, if I’m not happy with my current Public Cloud Service Provider, I can change providers without being locked into any specific proprietary infrastructure.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">I hope this was useful, both from helping you understand the “cloud” and VMware’s strategy around it.<span> </span>I’d like to focus future postings on some of the back end pieces that enable the cloud to give you an idea of why VMware and vSphere really is the best platform for cloud computing.</p>

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