Public and private clouds – what does this mean?
Steven Martin posted a blog entry today called Two flavors of cloud computing – Public and Private. Everybody looks excited, why? Maybe they are saying that finally, Microsoft will offer Azure as a product that they can install in their data centers!
Let’s start with the title:
>Two flavors of cloud computing – Public and Private
When Microsoft announced Azure at the 2009 PDC, it made clear that Azure is not a product that Microsoft will sell. It is an OS used internally to power Microsoft Cloud offering so the use of the word “private” might seam like Microsoft will offer Azure to it’s customers for their data centers at some point. Right? Hummm.
>…at some point in the future, the Azure Services Platform and an enterprise data center will be, technically speaking, largely indistinguishable
In this sentence, do you read “same product” or “same functionalities”? I think it’s the latter.
>…will use these learnings to drive additional benefits for customers not just in the cloud but also with our premises technologies
Here we see a clearer distinction “cloud” and “premises technologies”. What I get from this is Microsoft will add cloud related functionalities to Windows Server throughout the years.
>One of our primary objectives is to deliver the technology that empowers Enterprises to build private clouds within their existing datacenters.
Now, this is confusing and people will think that Azure will be available in the future to install in their data centers.
In his post, Steven refers to a previous post. In this one, there is no confusion.
That’s my take. What do you think?