Digital Media Buzz > Vendors Sketch Out Private Cloud Roadmap

Vendors Sketch Out Private Cloud Roadmap

Almost half, or 48.9 percent, of developers expect to deploy applications in a private cloud, according to research from Evans Data.

The study found 29.7 percent are currently working on applications intended for a private cloud environment, while another 19.2 percent expect to enter development within a year.

“Software developers are finding many reasons to develop software for the cloud, whether for a private cloud or a public cloud,” says John Andrews, Evans Data president, in a statement.

Cloud computing takes in infrastructure as a service; platform as a service; software as a service and other recent technologies that rely on the internet.

The service often provides business applications online that are accessed from a Web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers. A few cloud providers are beginning to offer this service. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), a new service that allows customers to connect to the company’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) services through a VPN.

Amazon’s EC2 provides complete control of a company’s computing resources and allows you to pay only for capacity that you on a pay-as-you-go-basis. AWS provides companies of all sizes with an infrastructure Web services platform in the cloud; while with VPC businesses can extend their security services, firewalls and intrusion-detection systems to its cloud.

In a post on the Amazon Web Services blog, the company said the new offering allows you to take advantage of the low cost and flexibility of AWS while leveraging your IT infrastructure investment. The new service is in a limited beta.

“I do want to mention a few of the things on our road map,” says Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, chief executive and president. “First, we’re planning to let you directly reach the internet from your VPC. Second, we’re planning to let you specify the IP address of individual Amazon EC2 instances within a subnet. Third, we’re evaluating ways to allow you to filter traffic per subnet, kind of how you might implement router ACLs.”

Two days after Amazon’s public statement, OpSource says it plans to offer easy online sign-up with infrastructure provisioning in minutes; pay by the hour and only for what you use; Web interface plus a complete set of APIs and VPCs with user-specified public internet connectivity.

OpSource CMO Richard Dym says after sign-up, each customer receives a Virtual Private Network and sets the degree of public internet connectivity the company wishes to grant, from totally private to fully available. “We believe that private clouds are not the best solution for the enterprise because they lose the community aspect of the public cloud; private clouds are really no more than more additional hardware and VMware,” Dym explains. “They are great for what they do, but they are really just bigger server farms, not clouds.”

He said OpSource is combining the availability, flexibility and community of the public cloud with the security, performance and controls that the enterprise demands. “Everybody in the cloud space competes with Amazon, already the grandfather of cloud and the company that defined the consumer cloud,” Dym says.

As part of the competitive landscape, Amazon EC2, RackSpace Cloud and IBM offer features like instant server deployments and Web-based control panel. But OpSource Cloud offers the two above-mentioned features as well as pay-as-you-go and pricing plans, configurable servers, dedicated VLANs, dedicated firewall options, VPN administration and role-based user permissions.

According to Dym, competition on the enterprise side includes IBM and HP who deliver private clouds that still lack the public cloud features as well as Terremark, which has multiple solutions for public and enterprise but no single integrated solution. (www.opsource.net/press/opsource-introduces-opsource-cloud-first-true-enterprise-cloud). “We believe that the OpSource Cloud will accelerate the adoption of cloud computing by the enterprise because of its unique feature set, which brings together the best of the public cloud with enterprise capabilities plus automatically includes a virtual private network that allows user control over their degree of public internet connectivity,” he says. “This will change the cloud marketplace and is also our advantage over any competitors.”

Dym agreed that security is the number one concern as companies consider using infrastructure as a service for both testing and development as well as production applications. “Security is difficult to add on as an afterthought, it needs to be built in and that is what we have done with OpSource Cloud,” he says.

Despite concerns about security, both Amazon and OpSource emphasize the promise of cloud computing has accelerated efficiency in the market.