The Cloud today is a bit like SOA in the early days. In Enterprise IT, everyone talks about it, but few companies venture moving their core systems from their datacenters to public Clouds. Actually a lot of companies are rather deploying Private Clouds in their own datacenters as an extension of successful virtualization deployments even though Amazon Web Services have been around for more than four years now.
Yesterday, MomemtumSI announced "Tough Software Solutions", a set of services which provide an elastic layer to IaaS platforms like VMWare vCloud Director or Eucalyptus. The services include Load Balancing, which distributes incoming application traffic accross multiple machines, Cloud Monitoring which monitor the health of cloud services accross thousands of machines in multiple data centers or cloud providers, and Auto Scaling which give the ability to acquire and release machines based on activity levels.
These three services are accessible via APIs that are strictly compatible with Amazon Web Services APIs: Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon CloudWatch™ and Amazon Auto Scaling.
InfoQ spoke briefly with Jeff Schneider, CEO of MomentumSI who explained:
Our enterprise customers have shown significant interest in the private cloud. They’ve seen all the cool stuff you can do in Amazon and they want it for themselves. However, they have a web of interconnected legacy applications and heterogeneous environments including mainframe, AIX, etc. that prevent them from making a wholesale jump to a cloud provider. This means that they have two choices. First, they can move a some of their Greenfield apps to the public cloud. This is great – but represents a minority of their systems. Second, they can make their own data centers work more like the cloud. The enterprise wants to enable their developers and testers to provision servers, load balancers, etc. in seconds. Currently, it often takes months to get these work orders pushed through. Also, they want common platforms for things like databases and message queues. Most enterprises have a rats nest of different platforms waiting for consolidation and PaaS enablement.
He added:
“For the large enterprise, it will take several years, possibly a decade, before they commit to moving to a public cloud provider. Private clouds represent the transition path, which is the reason we’re putting so much emphasis on making our solutions compatible with the leading cloud provider, Amazon Web Services.
The platform side of Cloud Computing seems to be at cross roads for the enterprise. IaaS or even PaaS have not changed much the way IT deploys and operates solutions. Will the Private Cloud be a stepping stone towards the vision of Enterprise Cloud Computing? Will most large companies still run datacenters in 2020? What's your take on it?