There's a
long standing joke in the cloud space. One that can be summed up as "All your bases R belong to your cloud
provider" a play on the pre-internet meme “all
your bases are belong to us” The mantra is one of not only
lock-in but one that has become a fundamental cloud business premise based upon
what has become a central requirement of a complete and total migration to the
cloud. One that assumes a binary choice must be made when deciding to use cloud
centric services. But the reality is the choice is one that must take a
wholistic view of many loosely coupled parts both local and remote. An
aggregated (hybrid) approach that understands that key metrics are constantly changing
and baseline capacity requirements are no longer as simple as mine or yours.
But instead built upon the base of a partnership within a federated group of
cloud services yours and mine.
Last week
I had the honor of meeting with the director of infrastructure for a major
California University. During our conversation he describe a concept he called
"Condo Computing" whereby a collective group of campuses are able
grain greater efficiencies by grouping together physical server assets into
jointly managed racks. Think of it as a physical collective of servers – old school multi tenancy. In essence each cabinet is like
a condo complex where each condo unit is a server or blade jointly managed
collectively but owned independently, yet enjoy secured access to a shared on
premise cloud environment for spikes in demand and disasters avoidance.
Continuing this analogy, each resident owns their baseline and has the ability
to rent the spike. Yes, it's zynga's mantra of
“Own the base - Rent the Spike” in action in the most unconventional
of places.
The
concept is ideal for the emerging hybrid federated architectures being adopted
by enterprises who are now beginning take their first steps into the cloud.
It's an architecture built on the knowledge and abilities they have in house
while also allowing the economics and flexibility found in using secure
remotely accessible cloud capacity. An evolutionary step forward while keeping
one foot on the ground.