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Private Cloud Is Not the Cloud: Amazon CTO

Werner Vogels explains the philosophy behind Amazon's new Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
By Jeremy Geelan
Article Rating:
August 26, 2009 02:00 PM EDT
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 1,251

"We have been listening very closely to the real requirements that our customers have and have worked closely with many...CIOs and their teams to understand what solution would allow them to treat the cloud as a seamless extension of their datacenter," wrote Amazon's VP & CTO, Werner Vogels, in a blog posting yesterday on the 3rd anniversary of the launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - the date chosen by Amazon also to launch its new Virtual Private Cloud, or Amazon VPC.


Dr Vogels keynoted SYS-CON's 2nd International Cloud Computing Expo

Vogels writes about the many conversations he has had with CIOs around the globe:

"They have bought into the cloud as a target for a significant portion of their services, as the benefits are too obvious to ignore, and most expect that their transition will be a continuous process. They would accelerate the adoption of cloud services if they could access a form of cloud that would give them the best of both worlds: the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of accessing a virtually infinite pool of resources without owning it, while being able to integrate those resources into their existing datacenter environments such that they could continue to leverage existing investments in their management and control infrastructure."

The problem, says Vogels, is that these CIOs know that what is sometimes dubbed "private cloud" does not meet their goal as it does not give them the benefits of the cloud: true elasticity and capex elimination. He continues:

"Virtualization and increased automation may give them some improvements in utilization, but they would still be holding the capital, and the operational cost would still be significantly higher."

Realizing that what these CIOs needed was a solution where they get all the benefits of cloud as mentioned above while treating it as a part of their datacenter, Amazon developed its latest offering, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. "Amazon VPC offers customers the best of both the cloud and the enterprise managed data center," notes Vogels.

For more details on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, visit the Amazon VPC detail page.

Published August 26, 2009 – Reads 1,251
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Jeremy Geelan

Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the all-new International Cloud Computing Expo series, of the International Virtualization Expo series, of AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series, and of the long-running SOAWorld Conference & Expo series. He's founder of Cloud Computing Journal, Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other leading SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.

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Most Recent Comments
mfmithani 09/01/09 03:33:00 AM EDT

If we define 'Cloud' as fully elastic, cost effective solution to deploy and manage business applications, then private data centers should not be called 'True Private Clouds'.

Private data centers could be fully elastic in nature to support dynamic resource demands of the business applications, but the cost to keep the resources stand-by will increase CapEx. So, the cost of bringing elasticity in the private data centers is directly proportional to the benefits, which is not cost effective approach.

This equation is right for 'Seasonal' business applications, as well as those reacts suddenly to external events. Seasonal business applications such as online 'E-card' portals or 'Online-shopping' portals, or 'Online Florist' . . . others like news and media supporting online applications, workload resource depends on the external factors, viz., Stock Market fluctuations, other breaking news and events.

These kinds of applications will have fluctuating resource demand to meet unpredictable dynamic business workloads. But I think a private data center could be transformed into considerably 'Good Private Cloud', if the organization has good IT resource governance in place to support the business applications and workload behavior, understand nature of the business and vision of the organization.

One of the solution to achieve it, if the organization transform IT support department into profit center from cost centre, by implementing effective chargeback system to various business units for the services it provides. This will considerably bring down the CapEx to bring the resource elasticity in the data centers.