Is Private Cloud a Cloud at all?

Has Cloud Computing been actually evolving? Who among Hybrid Clouds, Public clouds and private clouds will impact deeper penetration and why?

There has been a lot of noise and myths about cloud computing with creative terms such as the 'public cloud', 'private cloud' or 'hybrid cloud' that add to the complexity. For an offering to truly be 'Cloud Computing', it needs to have the following five characteristics.

First, No Capital Expenditure. You do not have to spend capital expenses on servers or data centers. You get to turn capital expense to variable expense, which is a huge advantage for companies that either do not have a lot of capital or those who simply do not want to tie capital to infrastructure.

Second, Pay for what you use. There is no upfront fee, no contract or commitment. You only pay for what you actually consume and have the flexibilities to choose the pricing model that best meets your business requirement.  Third, True Elastic Capacity. You can scale both up and down, and not sit on unneeded, excess capacity. Also, a cloud allows your applications and your business to seamlessly grow as quickly as you need. When you no longer need that capacity you can shed it just as quickly. Fourth, Fast Time to Market. You can move much more quickly with whatever projects you have. You can spin up large amounts of server capacity in minutes instead of waiting for days or weeks for capacity to be assigned to you.

Finally, Focus on Your Core Competence. You can take scarce engineering resources and instead of applying them to running infrastructure which is undifferentiated for most companies, you can spend time on projects that add value to your customer offerings or areas that differentiate your business.

If one or more of the above benefits do not exist, then it is not really cloud computing.

The term or idea 'Private Cloud' is an oxymoron then, as you see it?

When people talk about private or internal clouds, they are usually very expensive fixed cost, private installation of infrastructure which lacks all the key benefits of the cloud. Companies that build these types of internal clouds still own all the capital expense at the data centers and incur ongoing high maintenance costs. Companies should consider the notion of what really is private cloud because it is a term with cloud in it but lacks all the key benefits of the cloud.

For someone who delivers Cloud in a time and industry as today, how would you explain the accusation called 'Cloudwashing'? Or is the argument just a rhetoric?

While we have heard some fear, uncertainty and doubt being generated in the industry, providers of actual cloud services or those who have just cloud washed old offerings have to be on their toes because customers want and will demand flexibility. Flexibility includes the ability to walk away easily if customers do not get what they want, whether it is in terms of features, performance or security assurances. As for Amazon Web Service, we work hard every day in earning our customers business by innovating fast, providing a wide selection of services with exceptional performance and at low prices.

What has been your progress so far here? As planned?

We are seeing that companies ranging from small start ups to large enterprises are leveraging us. When we started the business, we suspected that smaller companies, particularly startups, would be the first ones to take advantage of our services. That is because the value proposition of no capital expenses, no upfront commitment, low unit costs, pay-as-you-go while receiving the same reliability, scalability and flexibility as if you were a much larger company is quite compelling to a start-up where cash and people resource are scarce. We are also seeing enterprises moving to the cloud at a fast pace because they are able to innovate more quickly in the cloud. Great ideas can take off and ideas that are not so good can fail inexpensively. In the past, developers had to wait oftentimes weeks to procure the infrastructure resources to test a new idea. Now, companies are unleashing more innovation in their organizations with access to cloud resources. In the fullness of time, not sure if it will be five, 10 or 20 years, we believe few companies will have their own datacenters and those that do will have much smaller footprints.

Are Indian CIOs warming up to the idea with the right pace?

Companies in India like Hungama Digital Media, Rediff, MarketSimplified, redBus, Indiagames, 8K Miles are examples of early adopters of Amazon Web Services in India that are growing very successfully and rapidly. The enterprises in India are beginning to realize the benefits and are taking steps to test development work and projects to learn how to work on the cloud. What most enterprises are doing is that they move more methodically. They pick a diverse set of initial applications to try as proofs of concepts in the cloud. They run them from a few weeks to a few months to see how the cloud is different and understand how they could operate inside the cloud. They are normally pretty excited by the results and they start trying to figure out how they can peel off more and more of their applications into the cloud. They then build a 12-to-36-month migration plan. We have actually seen and experienced good progress made in the enterprise segment because the enterprises are the ones that spend more total capital on the infrastructure than the smaller companies. It is attractive for enterprises to turn capital expenditure into operating expenditure and if they do it more quickly, it offers them a huge advantage.