Living in New England, we are blessed with a large variety of ice cream shops, offering a sometimes bewildering selection of flavors – regional selections such as Moose Tracks and Cranberry Bog, or, if we’re at Christina’s in Cambridge, more interesting flavors such as Ginger, Corn, or Kaffir Lime.  But, the old standbys of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry still outsell all others. Faced with the difficult choice between these three flavors, Neapolitan ice cream was invented in the late 1800’s – a single container with sections of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.  Properly dispensed, each serving contains a portion of each flavor. Delicious!

Speaking about Cloud with so many different people from different organizations, backgrounds, and perspectives, I often discuss the different styles of cloud computing, and categorize them as Private, Public, and Hybrid.  But, much like our ice cream, we shouldn’t necessarily think of this an either/or choice.  When an organization envisions what sort of services it wants to run in a cloud, and how they want to manage it, it turns out that reality is complex.  A given enterprise’s cloud is likely to have a wide variety of services, and these services will be private, hybrid, or public.  That is,  we need to think about these as private cloud services, hybrid cloud services, and public cloud services – all of which are services offered by IT within an enterprise’s cloud, with different characteristics.
That is:

• A private cloud service is a service that runs entirely on the organization’s own infrastructure
• A hybrid cloud service is a service that runs partially on the organization’s own infrastructure, and partially on an external service provider – typically for handling peak “overflow” work loads
• A public cloud service is a service running entirely on an external service provider

(An interesting sidebar is that these distinctions, while highly important for IT, should actually be transparent to the internal customer. If I obtain a service from IT, it shouldn’t really matter to me where it runs, as long as it works, and meets the SLAs).

Typically, IT wants to expose all these styles of services through a single, common request management interface, with standard and common policies, processes, and tools.   That is, a single management layer operating multiple service infrastructures, acting as a single platform with all three service flavors deployed together.  Implemented properly, this can be as appealing to the organization as a dish of the aforementioned Neapolitan ice cream (although not quite as refreshing).

Note that I say IT typically wants a single, common management platform, because there are valid considerations and situations where IT would want or need to run operate multiple clouds, separate and distinct from one another. That discussion, One Cloud or Many, is the topic of my next posting in this series.