Private Cloud is a Fool's Erand

I'm about to offend people building private clouds but fight me!

This isn’t just clickbait. Some companies have leveraged private cloud architectures with success. However, the vast majority of customers should focus on simplicity, and private clouds are far from simple. We went down the private cloud route as an industry in the 2010s. Most projects failed due to the complexity of operating any infrastructure as a service.

We (The collective customer community) looked at AWS’s margin and thought we could build a better AWS on-premises. We found that AWS’ incentives were much different than those of end customers. AWS built IaaS as a product. We were building IaaS as a cost-center alternative to AWS.

We encountered all kinds of challenges, including not keeping pace with the innovation of the public cloud providers. We didn’t have the scale of interest to justify the investment in services commonly found in these large providers. And most importantly, we couldn’t train and retain the talent for the private cloud.

Aren’t you the Hybrid Guy?

Yes, I’ve preached a hybrid approach to enterprise operations since the original “Cloud First” movement. However, I think many have over-engineered this hybrid approach.

I argue that your private data center needs a fundamental control plane for storage, networking, servers, and security/identity. This allows you to move projects as they mature from the public cloud to the private data center/colocation. You may run Kubernetes, object storage, or even a message bus to accommodate modern application architecture, but you don’t need to compete with the public cloud on advanced services. That isn’t very reasonable, IMO.

I can make this about 1500 words, but the point is to drive the conversation. Reply to this thread via email or comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Is the private cloud a legitimate alternative to the public cloud, or is it too complex for the average environment?