Engwar

Private cloud endeth?!

I agree with what Werner said about the private cloud. From Amazon’s point of view, it make sense to “kill it” since they’re not going to make money when someone is having a private cloud. So it’s logical to sell their VPC offering as a replacement to a private cloud.

If you take a step back and look at the big picture, I think the audience for a private cloud is vastly different from the audience for a public cloud.

Public cloud is the ideal solution if you’re just a startup trying to setup infrastructure such as source code repositories, bug trackers, wikis, CRMs and so on. Utilizing features of a public cloud like Amazon EC2, you can increase the computing resource when you need it. No need to pay big sums upfront for high end hardware. You can expand or shrink your computing resources as you go along.

Private cloud, on the other hand, is useful if you already have the hardware. You have purchased high end hardware anticipating your resource needs in the future and now they’re under utilized. In this case, having a private cloud infrastructure will help you to make use of your otherwise idle computing resources. Pay as you go feature of public clouds doesn’t apply in this case. Elasticity, yes, if your applications are written using the same APIs.

For example, WSO2 Stratos, can scale in Amazon EC2 as well as in a private cloud such as UEC (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud). UEC runs Eucalyptus for providing a private cloud infrastructure which is API compatible with Amazon EC2/S3/EBS.

So, IMHO, public cloud and private cloud has their own places in this world.