Mixing the public and private cloud

  • Article

No one except startups will completely embrace the public cloud immediately. This means that a mixed environment of some services on site and some not will persist for some time in many organisations.  For any given service, a decision will be made about where to put it , in the public cloud to expand business opportunity and change the costing model for it, or to keep it under tighter control and keep it in house. 

The tools and techniques to make this a really simple process are only just emerging and of course the application itself has to have some changes to make flexible enough to cope with this.While many applications can be ported to azure whether they are .Net, Java or PHP to make them work properly they will probably need some changes if only to make them more fault tolerant to cope with the longer latency and distributed nature of the cloud.

But that’s not the world of the IT Professional. Our world is managing infrastructure and in the Microsoft world System Center is front and centre for this and this is evolving to enable unified management of what is referred to as hybrid cloud:

  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 will have server application virtualisation which will all applications to be packaged up and deployed to Azure. 
  • Concero the newest bit of the System Center will give you the elusive one pane of glass showing your public and private cloud.
  • the Azure Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (CU3 or later)  which allows you to see how your application is performing in Azure

There are also the management tools in Azure itself including the database manager for SQL Azure and Data Sync to keep an on premises database in sync with its cloud counterpart.

Simon and I are back on air for TechDays OnLine next Tuesday for a session on Mixing and Moving Services between the Private and Public Cloud and I can think of three reasons why you should tune in…

  1. We’ll be to show you this stuff and field your questions
  2. I think this is the future and it’s more important than ever in this uncertain world that you are up to date with the cloud as it affects the IT Professional.  A good example of this trend is that Fujitsu have just launched their own Azure powered Global Platform Service so that customers in Japan can get a local service which should mitigate any concerns about data privacy 
  3. Samantha our awesome intern has sorted out a competition to win a Samsung 42” plasma TV, you just need to follow the clues in the sessions.