What is it with cloud computing? Engage VM, disengage brain?

The cake is a lie

You might notice a theme here. The theme is that the biggest advertised benefit of the cloud – the cake, if you will – is a lie. That dream that you will save vast quantities of money because you don't have to actually think about the pesky details of how your infrastructure is run, is just that: a dream.

If you want push-button simple infrastructure, you can buy that. Nutanix and SimpliVity will cheerfully sell you a server cluster with associated storage, hypervisors and so forth. VCE will sell you anything from a rack to a data center, and most of the majors will cheerfully sell you entire sea cans pre-assembled and ready to go.

If you feel the burning need for the orchestration goodness of that cloudy special sauce, you don't need to go far to find it. Pivotal will gladly get you going with Cloud Foundry, making either your VMware or Openstack setup shine. Redhat's OpenShift can do the same, while Microsoft offers Azure on premises.

Don't feel like setting it up yourself? Pistoncloud is as close to clicking "next, next, next" and getting a fully ready to rock OpenStack private cloud as currently exists. Metacloud will not only install OpenStack for you, they'll manage it. Both of these can move workloads to other OpenStack clouds and back again. Or can be used as the disaster recovery, or any combination you can imagine.

If it's ease of use you crave, you can have it, and you don't need to give up control over your data to get it. If what you're looking for is time to market, the public cloud still may not deliver because you still need to put in the basic amount of care and feeding of your data.

You can spin up a VM in seconds on a public cloud, but that doesn't mean you should just take that VM and build a business on it. You still need to care about managing risk, even in the cloud. ®