Abstraction things that don’t work
One of the challenges with private cloud is that we tried to abstract a substrate that wasn’t ready.
Circa 2011, I was part of several different efforts inside of Lockheed Martin to build private (on-premises) clouds for civil service agencies within the U.S. Federal government. I see the efforts renewed in 2021. All of the public cloud providers have an on-premises cloud solution. The major IT OEM's have a strategy. The common challenge? The last mile.
The Public Cloud works partially because the public cloud providers can abstract a common substrate and enjoy the economies of scale. The Private/On-premises cloud requires an abstraction on top of an uncommon substrate. There's enough difference between every customer's infrastructure to make the private cloud framework elusive.
For example, I see the stitching together several colo providers to build a fabric to deliver a platform requires negotiating contracts and deploying services on top of manual or very different platforms. Our friends at Edgevana are trying to solve that problem.
Things have gotten better. Companies such as Edgevana have sprouted to help close the gap. However, the abstraction of inadequate services doesn't provide the substrate needed to deliver platforms.
How do you ensure you aren’t building your house on sand?