I went to the Eduserv symposium last week – entitled ‘Virtualisation and the Cloud’. It was a well attended and well presented event which had many excellent speakers on a variety of topics concerning the state of cloud computing in the world at the moment. And while there were many interesting points made, two ideas struck me as very interesting.
The first idea was that building a genuine cloud computing solution should be left to the big guys – trying to create a cloud type solution on a small scale is fine as long as you don’t expect to reap the benefits that an industrial provider could give you. The principal of these is the ability to handle ‘burstiness’, i.e. short –term peaks in your system’s computing cycles or storage requirements. In order to handle this on a private cloud, you would have to invest large sums of money to handle a short-term problem – the very thing that the Cloud is meant to help with.
