In this blog:
- Cloud Repatriation is the Choice of Cloud Professionals
- Why Use Public Clouds?
- Why Use Private Clouds?
- Private Clouds vs. Public Clouds
- Why are Public Cloud Users Leaving?
- Are Traditional Private Clouds too Expensive and Difficult?
- The On-Demand OpenStack Private Cloud Solves These Problems
Cloud Repatriation is the Choice of Cloud Professionals
Public cloud users are finding out that for all their convenience and so-called affordability, public clouds are often not suitable for their workloads. Serious work requires serious infrastructure. Private clouds are the perfect solution for experienced cloud professionals who are tired of shocking cloud bills, or disappointing performance from their public cloud infrastructure.
Historically, private clouds have been difficult to set up and operate; however, OpenMetal’s Private Cloud product gives you a private cloud on public cloud terms. Provision an On-Demand OpenStack Private Cloud today and start your private cloud future. You may also be interested in What is Cloud Repatriation for more context.
Why Use Public Clouds?
Public clouds pioneered the consumption-based model of computing for the mass market. They gave developers, engineers, and teams of all sizes the same tools and resources as enterprises to build and serve highly available, highly redundant, easily scalable applications and infrastructure. The public cloud provides an entry point into running and operating large infrastructure that is generally out of reach for smaller teams and organizations that cannot afford data centers, networking, hardware, and all the other pieces of physical infrastructure required to run production workloads on the Internet.
Why Use Private Clouds?
Private clouds combine the best of traditional on-premises infrastructure and the public cloud. Private cloud solutions, like OpenStack, give you the ability to squeeze more utilization from your hardware and infrastructure and flexibly allocate your compute and storage resources. They are the go-to choice of enterprises because they give large teams and organizations the ability to build infrastructure customized and optimized to meet their own needs best. The one-size-fits-all architecture of public clouds means public clouds are not a perfect fit for every use case.
Private Clouds vs. Public Clouds
Public clouds and private clouds, especially OpenStack, are actually largely similar when it comes to their features and functionality. They both provide flexible compute, storage, networking, and other resources on an on-demand basis. Private clouds have several fundamental differences that make them superior choices. With the advent of on-demand private cloud eliminating the initial setup hurdle, the path is now clear to access the advantages inherent in private cloud.
On-Demand Resources
Public clouds have the advantage of requiring no setup or infrastructure to manage. You can provision resources immediately with a single click. Private clouds have historically required significant research, work, and upfront investment to build your cloud infrastructure before you even begin to deploy your workloads.
Greater Cost Efficiencies
Private clouds are often much more cost-effective than public clouds when they reach certain economies of scale. Public clouds charge a relatively high markup on commodity hardware and resources. One of the advantages of a cloud model is that using commodity hardware is not a problem because hardware failures are mitigated by the cloud. However, achieving the necessary economies of scale for private clouds can be difficult for small and even medium-sized teams. For further detail, see our Public Cloud vs Private Cloud – Cost Tipping Points.
Security and Governance
Privacy and security are some of the biggest advantages private clouds have over public clouds. When you run your workloads on a public cloud, your workloads coexist alongside other customers’ workloads on the same physical infrastructure. There’s a minimal security risk from someone breaking out of their virtual environment and entering yours, but even that small risk is too much for sensitive work involving confidential data. Private clouds by default belong only to you; you do not share hardware with other users.
Public cloud platforms have also historically struggled with providing good models for new-to-the-cloud users to keep their data and their infrastructure secure and private. Private cloud solutions like OpenStack give you strong defaults and examples for creating secure cloud infrastructure.
Why Are Public Cloud Users Leaving?
Experienced public cloud professionals have long enjoyed the flexibility and ease with which you can deploy workloads onto the public cloud. However, after years of public cloud usage, these knowledgeable cloud architects and administrators are tired of running up huge cloud bills and not knowing what to expect their infrastructure to cost from month to month. The public cloud’s same flexibility and ease of use make unoptimized code or sudden changes in traffic into large, shocking expenses.
Several high-profile incidents with public clouds have eroded general trust in public clouds over the last few years. Public clouds have had a number of high-profile self-inflicted outages, undermining their credibility as always-up, too-big-to-fail infrastructure solutions. Sensitive confidential information for millions of people has been leaked again and again due to the poor privacy and security management tools public clouds provide.
Most importantly, though, serious cloud operators realize they need infrastructure custom-tailored to meet their unique needs in order to compete at the same level as their larger competitors. The most successful companies build and operate their own infrastructure optimized for their particular business cases.
Many of the largest public clouds were not built to power your infrastructure. AWS, for example, was originally built to power Amazon.com, and Google’s cloud offering was built from the infrastructure that powers Google Search and other Google-branded products. Unless you are running one of the largest e-commerce operations or search engines on the planet, these public clouds are probably not going to be a great fit for your workload over the long term.
Are Traditional Private Clouds Too Expensive and Difficult?
Traditionally private clouds were difficult to build. They required significant upfront investment in time, training, engineering, and physical infrastructure (e.g. hardware, data center space, power, cooling, networking, etc.). There are several software solutions, both closed source, and open source, that turn your hardware resources into cloud resources. Although these solutions are generally much better than trying to write your own cloud management system, they are difficult to configure for production, and some, like VMware, carry heavy licensing fees and costs for running your cloud.
The On-Demand OpenStack Private Cloud Solves These Problems
An On-Demand OpenStack Private Cloud gives you the privacy, security, and performance of a private cloud with the flexibility and scalability of a public cloud. You can have a fully production-ready private cloud within 45 minutes with no long-term commitment. Pay for what you need for as long as you need.
OpenStack is open-source, enterprise-grade software for running serious cloud workloads. It is the go-to choice for experienced cloud architects and operators in industries including but not limited to telecommunications, high-performance computing, cloud hosting, software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, automotive, and scientific research. OpenStack has all of your favorite cloud features but without any of the licensing costs or the concerns that come with using closed-source, proprietary software.
Until now, OpenStack has been out of reach for everyone except for the enterprise thanks to its difficult configuration and its physical infrastructure requirements. The On-Demand OpenStack Private Cloud solves all of the difficulties of getting started with OpenStack so you can enjoy the features and value of OpenStack right away without having to become an OpenStack architect first.
Join the experienced public cloud operators who are reclaiming their cloud independence and slashing their infrastructure costs by moving their workloads to an On-Demand OpenStack Private Cloud.
If you want to learn more about private cloud and OpenStack check out some of our articles:
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