Over on the Enterprise Irregulars mailing list, someone asked what “private cloud” means. As ever, that group has a fascinating response. Here’s how I responded, which sums up a lot of what I’ve been saying on the topic of late, mostly in the IT Management & Cloud podcast:

What Private Cloud Seems to Mean

When I encounter “private cloud,” it usually means applying cloud technologies (virtualization, self-service, automation, generalized pools of resources [driven by the previous]) behind the firewall. It’s more than virtualization consolidation, though virtualization is a huge part – if not the most important technological enabler. The self-service (or “run book,” if you’re old school) parts are important as well.

I’m extremely suspicious of private cloud being much of a cost savings, but if it was done properly you would get the non-financial benefits of (public) cloud computing: quick boot-strapping, not having to wait 4 weeks for the DBA to get to your email, etc. In theory, this means IT can stop being slow (as they’re trained and rewarded to do with their “we fear change” philosophy – needed for how crappy enterprise IT tends to be during updates) and speed up. There’s also some (potential) process change in getting developers and operations people more friends, flying under the phrase of “dev/ops” in the gasbagosphere (myself included there).

The main thing that frustrates me about private cloud is that it seems to be a way for vendors to make money twice off cloud computing: once in the private cloud transformation, and then once all the fears blow over/get fixed, a second time for the public cloud transformation. It’s like retail in the early 90’s: remember when “no one” would dare type their credit card number into “the Internet”? Now everyone does, of course.

That cynicism aside, I do think that the happy path of “private cloud” is much better than whatever you want to call how IT is run now (ITSM, maybe, but that’s a bit unfair to ITSM). The main thing that frustrates me is this focus on “we must own our precious data” instead of innovating around/beyond that constraint. Sure, it’s “real,” and I’m not belittling it, but I expect more from the industry than to let that be a wall that keeps innovation at bay.

More

That’s an incomplete view, but I think it applies to the majority of instances of “private cloud” I come across. I’m sure the EI thread will pull out plenty more interesting to pile on. You can’t really be an absolutist about cloud computing, let along private clouds: throwing out a loose definition like the above is always a good honey-pot for better ones. For example, my podcasting buddy John Willis has a pretty good rant on why private cloud is actually awesome, ask him about it sometime. Also, see James’ discussion of EMC and VMWare’s private cloud recent machinations.