Convenience trumps 'open' in clouds and data centers

Sorry OpenStack and Open Compute, we're not all Facebook

The new and the old

One of the biggest problems with the private cloud is the nature of the workloads enterprises are tempted to run within it.

As Bittman writes in separate research, while VMs running in private clouds have increased three-fold in the past few years, even as the overall number of VMs has tripled, the number of active VMs running in public clouds has expanded by a factor of 20.

This means that: “Public cloud IaaS now accounts for about 20 per cent of all VMs – and there are now roughly six times more active VMs in the public cloud than in on-premises private clouds.”

And why?

Because, he concludes:

New stuff tends to go to the public cloud, while doing old stuff in new ways tends to go to private clouds.

And new stuff is simply growing faster.

That company-changing app that will make your career? It’s running on AWS. Ditto all the other projects that promise to transform your business and, perhaps, your industry.

Meanwhile, the private cloud is the receptacle of tried-and-true workloads that just need a new home. Helpful to the business, sure. But not transformative.

For those looking to OpenStack and Open Compute, these may prove to be excellent ways to modernize old infrastructure. But they aren’t likely going to be the places you choose to build the future.

That’s going to be on AWS, or Azure, or Google.

These are closed clouds, but customers don’t seem too put out by the proprietary nature of the cloud. As Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady says: “Convenience trumps just about everything" when it comes to technology adoption and, in particular, the cloud.

Customer surveys support this.

While a bit dated (2012), Forrester’s findings remain just as true today:

Asking IT to set up a hyper-efficient Facebook-like data centre isn’t the “fastest way to get [things] done". Ditto cobbling together a homegrown OpenStack solution. In fact, private cloud is rarely going to be the right way to move fast.

Sure, there are other reasons, but the cloud that wins will be the cloud that is most convenient. Unless something drastic changes, that means public cloud will emerge triumphant. ®