Public Private Hybrid or Community Cloud Which is Right for YOU?

There are several critical decisions you need to make as your organization takes its first step into cloud computing:

Abstract: A self-assessment tool to assists IT-departments in enterprises evaluate all possible cloud-models to work out which is right for their business.  

  1. Whether to make use of one of the public cloud services offered by vendors like Amazon, MS Azure & Google;

    OR

  2. Build a private cloud where you also have to decide whether to operate in- house, or use a managed services provider 

    OR

  3. Combine private & public cloud with a hybrid cloud: Build the cloud infrastructure on-premise then use public cloud for: Workloads replication, disaster recovery & burst-out capacity needs;

    OR

  4. The fourth option is to join or even start a community cloud: A group of industry-common organizations agreeing on a model to sharing and accounting for consumption of virtual resources.


TIP: You may find that one cloud model works best for one project but not another. It’s about finding the best balance of Speed, cost, utilization & compliance.


Public  cloud


Is a public cloud right for you?


If you can tick most of these indicators, public cloud may be your best option


Speed

Your project needs to get up and running in under six months


Your project has a short-term lifecycle making a rent-now option attractive to building it  



Budget

There’s no capex budget available for this project


There’s opex budget available for this project



Resources

Your technical team is very small


Your technical team doesn’t have a lot of virtualization or cloud experience


You struggle to hire developers and sysadmins with cloud skills


Demand

Demand for your cloud application is likely to be unpredictable


Demand for your cloud application or service will experience peaks & troughs


Your current IT infrastructure will struggle to handle the workloads


Privacy | Compliance

You are happy to host your applications and data in a 3rd party data center


You are comfortable making your applications & data accessible via the internet




TIP: A public cloud approach may appear cost-effective than a private cloud at first but beware of ‘image sprawl.’ Paying for VM licenses in the cloud could see costs spiral out of control. To keep costs down, rent short term &  use a free open source OS instead.


Private cloud


Is a private cloud right for you?


If you can tick most of these indicators, private cloud may be your best option


Speed

You have the time to build, an internal private cloud first before deploying your apps


You already have the cloud infrastructure available                  


Your project has a med-long term lifecycle, so building seems attractive to renting


Budget 

There is capex or opex budget to build the private cloud infrastructure


There is a opex budget available to operate & manage the cloud infrastructure



Resources

You have a good sized in-house technical team                                  


Your technical team has virtualization or cloud experience      


You have a budget  to hire developers & sysadmins with cloud skills


Demand

Your cloud infrastructure will be able to handle demand even during high peaks




Privacy | Compliance

Your project involves sensitive data subject to data & privacy laws


Your data & apps must be hosted on premise or at an approved dc in country


Your SLA / IT governance policies specify that the data will be hosted by you



Tip: You have time & budget to build a private cloud but may need expertise to operate. Consider a fully managed service from Canonical.
If you have cloud-operations expertise, or, are willing to learn, consider Red Hat or openQRM. They all use OpenStack!

Click here to Test-Drive all available IaaS Infrastructure as a Service platforms 



  

Hybrid cloud


Is a hybrid cloud right for you?


If you can tick most of these indicators, hybrid cloud may be your best option


Speed

You have built a private cloud 


                                  



Budget

There is an opex budget to operate your private cloud infrastructure


There is an opex budget to rent / consume 3rd party resources as needed on demand 


T

Resources

You have an internal cloud that is ready to use


Your technical team has virtualization or cloud experience

 

You have a budget to hire developers & sysadmins with cloud skills 


Demand

Your in-house cloud may not be able to handle high peaks of user demand  


Business requires a higher level of service availability by replicating workloads



Privacy | Compliance

Your project involves non sensitive data 





Tip: Interoperability between clouds is vital in a hybrid approach. Any OpenStack based platform hybrids well to AWS and to other OpenStack clouds. So does MS Azure Stack with Azure cloud

Click here to Test Drive MS Azure Stack 



Community cloud

Is a community cloud right for you?


If you can tick most of these indicators, community cloud may be your best option


Speed

You already have the cloud infrastructure available 


There are others similar to start sharing resources with 


You are already member of a community cloud


Budget

There is an opex budget to operate your private cloud infrastructure


There is a budget available to connect to a community cloud 




Resources

You have an internal cloud that is ready to use


Your technical team has virtualization or cloud experience 


You have a budget & staff to hire developers & sysadmins with cloud skills


Demand

Your in-house cloud may not be able to handle high peaks of user demand


Your in-house cloud may not be able to handle bursts of data processing / analytics


Workloads in your cloud are not being replicated in a second site and this has an impact to your service-availability


Privacy | Compliance

Your project involves sensitive data subject to data & privacy laws


Your data & apps must be hosted on premise or at an approved dc in country




Tip: The greenest, most efficient use of resources are underutilized resources. Combining underutilized resources in any community cloud: National, science, education, defense, banking etc. carries significant benefits to members sharing.

Click here to Test-Drive Red Hat OpenStack 13 with OpenShift