The best thing about public cloud is it’s cheaper to fail than belabor conversations about whether to try it or not. If you physically touched it, estimated your peak demand before buying, and/or don’t have a re-occurring OpEx fee… IT’S NOT CLOUD.
If you’re an IT manager calling your internal VMware or other virtualization farm a “Private Cloud” in an attempt to prove to your leadership that “public cloud is insecure” or “I built the same thing as Amazon Web Services (AWS)”, you need to get ready for a dose of reality in the coming year.
Server-huggers beware, you might have been able to get away with it until now, but 2013 will mark a turning point in which the term Private Cloud will be permanently exposed for what it is… a capital intensive, server stacking, virtualization game.
Just because you might have flexibility to decide how much RAM you can assign to a VM, doesn’t give you the right to “cloud-wash” your internal IT operation and call it something that it’s not… because although it may be Private (can someone tell me again why it’s important to be able to touch your servers?), it’s certainly not Cloud.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…