Many organizations are using VMware, OpenStack and other
technologies to take their clouds in-house, building private cloud
infrastructures to reduce their costs and dependence on providers like Amazon
AWS. Anyone who has already ventured on a private cloud project has more than likely encountered the
enormous complexity of the field, at every level: business, architecture,
infrastructure, virtualization, and workload management.
With that in mind, I recently spoke with the team at Stratoscale
- the maker of Symphony, a tool that sets up a private cloud with AWS-like
capabilities on your local machines in minutes - and found out that they have set out to make private cloud more accessible,
not just for cloud infrastructure specialists, but also for ordinary IT and
DevOps professionals who want to better understand how they can leverage this
technology. To do that, they have created something that has totally blown me away! They have taken it upon themselves to build a Private Cloud Wiki. After spending quite some time navigating it, I'm dubbing it a 'must visit knowledge hub' that collects all the relevant information on private cloud
technology from around the world, and organizes it in a meaningful structure:
This project was quite the undertaking.
The wiki started with an intensive 6-months worth of research where the first stage was building a tree of over 200 sub-topics around private
cloud technology including: private cloud architecture, strategy and
economics; private cloud platforms like VMware vRealize and OpenStack; Cloud
Management Platforms; virtualization strategies for private clouds; and modern
data center architecture including hyperconvergence technology.
The Stratoscale team told VMblog they collected over 100,000 web pages that
cover these subjects, hand-picked the most relevant ones for each category, and
divided them into "content types" such as How To, Case Studies, Real Life
Examples, Vendor Information, Product Comparisons, and so on.
The wiki is still in its infancy with around 60 content
pages, but I'm told that new category pages are being added on a weekly basis.
Making Sense of the Space
If you search Google for any of these specific topics,
you'll get a bunch of products, some articles, pages from StackOverflow and
similar sites, mixed up with pages that contain only a few lines, are unclear,
out of date, or useless for other reasons. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to sift through
all that and really learn about the space.
Plus, there's no context. If you search for "private cloud
deployment" you won't be able to move up a level to learn about "private cloud
operations and management", and see other related subjects like "private cloud
security" and "private cloud orchestration", or drill down to learn about specific
types of private cloud deployments, e.g. how to deploy OpenStack vs. VMware.
The Stratoscale wiki provides all of that and adds another
layer of meaning above the basic indexing that Google provides.
When asked if this was simply going to be a Stratoscale effort or a one-sided conversation, the answer was unequivocally "no." A central realization behind the wiki is that even though the company employs some of the world's top cloud computing experts, Stratoscale early on realized
that they aren't the only ones writing about the space, and in many parts of
this field, there are others who are more specialized. They decided to bring all
these community voices to the front stage and let visitors choose from a large
variety of views and opinions - even those of their direct competitors.
This is a democratization of technical knowledge which can save
a lot of time for the many professionals who are adopting and deepening their
knowledge of modern cloud infrastructure. I'm going to continue to watch this wiki grow and I plan on using it as one of my own educational resources.
Check it out at: http://wiki.stratoscale.com