Cloud hosting has been in existence for 10 years. Going into its second decade, it’s time for something new. So, what’s the latest trend? Good old, plain dedicated servers — but rebuilt and reinvented.
Although it is not required by any definition of a cloud, virtualization has become part and parcel of cloud hosting — not because it is necessary for clouds, but merely because it is very convenient.
By now, we all know that cloud computing eliminates the need to purchase, deploy, and maintain IT assets. The primary selling point of cloud services is that the cloud vendor takes on full infrastructure responsibility for running hosted applications.
Gartner Research underscores the total cost of ownership (TCO) advantages by estimating that the annual cost of owning and managing software applications can be as much as four times the cost of the initial purchase. All size businesses are moving away from the general mindset that these numbers are merely a cost of doing business. The new mantra entails the notion of slashing expenses and still improving the agility, competitive advantage, and profitability of an organization through the reduction of capital expenses (CAPEX).
The data center has been evolving from its mainframe days to the current software defined model in large part due to technology constraints and development, market forces, and business constraints. This has resulted in deployment architectures and operating models that are more complex (silos, sprawl, underutilization, etc.), with lower visibility into operational status. This evolution is illustrated in Figure 1.
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Conventional wisdom has it that software as a service (SaaS) is the “insecure but convenient” alternative for IT solutions. However, increasingly sophisticated SaaS solutions and growing awareness of possible limitations with on-premises solutions are turning that conventional wisdom on its head: SaaS might very well be the more secure and enterprise-ready of the two alternatives for a wide class of IT solutions.
Before diving into specific comparisons of SaaS vs. on-premises alternatives, let’s review some common perceptions about SaaS:
For five years, OpenStack contributors have delivered a steady stream of open source solutions to help automate and simplify cloud operations. It began with cloud computing, where KVM has established itself as the hypervisor of choice for OpenStack virtual clouds. Similarly, Ceph has made itself the defacto standard for OpenStack storage. But until recently, advances in OpenStack networking have lagged compute and storage because managing multi-vendor cloud networks remained too hard and time consuming.
While most network vendors collaborate on things like interoperability, IP protocols, and network standards, there’s little harmony on Layer 3 network services. Simply put, a virtualized Cisco firewall is not designed to work on Juniper routers. You can’t run an Alcatel deep packet inspection on an Ericsson managed network. And Layer 4-7 application performance management from F5 cannot be abstracted to run on any edge routing platform you choose without significant backend integration work.
