Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop
Public Cloud Gets its Act Together
As Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft
Azure have made abundantly apparent, public cloud IaaS has huge advantages.
Massive scalability and elasticity, the ability to shift infrastructure costs
from capital expenses to operational expenses, and great economies of scale are
just a few of the major advantages of public cloud; however, public cloud has
still lagged behind physical networking in a few key areas, including
management and monitoring. In the public cloud, there is no NetFlow or sFlow or
even a close equivalent. This leaves enterprises with little ability to monitor
network traffic within the cloud, and thus little visibility into local
cloud-based services.
This is about to change. In 2015, virtual
networking and the cloud will really start to catch up to physical networking.
Over the past few years, AWS has already made some major strides with Virtual
Private Cloud (VPC), but this year, expect to see management and monitoring
become a top priority for both AWS and Azure as they compete to woo enterprise
customers. Both AWS and Azure recognize that their market opportunity for
large-scale deployments is limited until they can provide monitoring and
management capabilities comparable to physical networks. With both giants
competing for market share, don't be surprised to see new capabilities develop quickly
over the next 12 months.
Private Cloud, not so much...
Despite the incredible hype around public
cloud, it is dwarfed by the market opportunity in private cloud. Every large
enterprise IT organization would love to run a private cloud with the ability
to seamlessly provision VMs. Unfortunately, the solutions available on the
market today still have a long way to go until they are ready for widespread
adoption.
Part of the challenge is market
fragmentation. The different approaches - from OpenStack, to Eucalyptus
(acquired by HP), to Cisco UCS, Azure-in-a-Box, and VMware - have created
confusion among enterprise customers and have made it nearly impossible to
establish broad industry standards. The different offerings themselves are
often difficult to implement as well.
While
OpenStack may be the closest thing private cloud has to an industry trade
group, the vendors within this ecosystem often come to the table with competing
goals and priorities, slowing down progress and creating friction. Openstack is
also notoriously difficult to stand up, and requires highly capable engineers
to deploy and maintain it. In today's job market, that kind of skilled labor
comes with a hefty price tag. Documentation and implementation also remain
problematic. Most components are pluggable, but some combinations are
incompatible, and some are better documented than others. In some cases, the
documentation is little better than a direction to read the code. Another open-source offering, Eucalyptus (recently
acquired by HP), avoids the pitfalls of having competitive vendors contributing
solutions by having most offerings come from a single vendor. While this has
its advantages, it also slows the pace of innovation.
Unlike OpenStack, VMware offers a single vendor solution, which
has its advantages. When something goes wrong, there is someone to blame. But
it also has its share of challenges. For one, it's expensive. Also, it's
difficult to install and maintain. And while it offers
OpenStack compatibility, the result of this seems to be mixing the high capex
cost of OpenStack (thanks to the human capital investment it requires) with the
high opex cost of VMware.
Other vendors have similar challenges, and sadly it seems unlikely that this is going to change any
time soon, certainly not in 2015. The private cloud market opportunity is vast.
The players in this space need to take a page out of AWS' and Azure's books and
focus on making private cloud far more user-friendly.
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About the Author
Jesse
Rothstein is the CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop, the global leader in real-time wire data
analytics for IT intelligence and business operations.