There’s a fear factor among many organizations about moving from public to private cloud. Developers are enjoying the public cloud because of its agility and freedom, and they think that private cloud represents a return to the days when it took weeks to provision new compute, network and storage resources.
But that’s simply not the case.
There’s a whole new infrastructure layer, right above the metal and the compute resources, that enables a public cloud-like experience on-premises. Platina Systems has improved the tech stack dramatically.
On-Premises Challenges
Before the DevOps movement came about, there were developers and operations teams, and these two groups were essentially at odds with each other. Developers wanted to move quickly, and if you want to move quickly, you need a dynamic environment. But operations people didn’t want to get woken up in the middle of the night, and if you don’t want to get woken up in the middle of the night, you need a stable environment. This naturally occurring friction slowed down teams and therefore their entire businesses.
Additionally, the way operations teams built compute infrastructure was very different. There was a vendor-specific hardware box for every component, and they had to connect and configure them without the use of APIs or automation. Provisioning a simple bare metal server required many manual steps, checking boxes on checklists, and laborious, manual work. Who wants to do this?
Today, a lot of these boxes are containers or virtual machines. Minimally, you need servers and switches, and everything else is a software element that you can load onto your private cloud. The developers then get to decide how these elements are connected and how they should work together. They get the agility they’ve come to expect from the public cloud, without having to wake up the operations team in the middle of the night, but now in a private cloud environment.
Having said that, of course the underlying servers and network will still require human management. Even if you look at some of the major components of cloud native infrastructure today, such as Kubernetes and Ceph, they start their lifecycles on a fully provisioned server. None of them really address the underlying compute infrastructure or the basic configuration of the network. Someone is going to have to rack a server, get it up and running on the network and install an operating system. If you’re left to do it yourself, this scenario can feel like a return to the old days in the enterprise data center.
Enter Platina
The notion of the traditional systems administrator is going away. The work of a traditional systems administrator is now the work that Amazon, Google and Microsoft are automating at massive scale in the public cloud. Now we have DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers that are doing higher-level work that delivers more value to businesses. If you move from public to private cloud, who is going to do that work for you?
Platina is filling the gap.
Platina can help set up and manage the entire tech stack, including servers, networking and storage, from hardware to software, within a single private portal. Because Platina makes the infrastructure layer so simple, the work that a traditional systems or network administrator would do can now be done by your remote hands staff in the data center or by a managed services provider.
Why Private Cloud Now?
The move from public to private cloud has benefits across the organization — not just for developers, who still get the agility they need, and operations teams, who still get to sleep through the night.
Enterprise IT can keep using the cloud native management tools it uses for public cloud workloads.
Security teams can more easily ensure that company data is safe, secured, managed and compliant with regulations when it resides in a known physical environment.
Finance can get a handle on cloud spending and avoid the hidden costs, such as data egress charges and unpredictable utilization costs.
The public cloud has brought tremendous benefits to companies large and small, but more than half of the world’s data isn’t or can’t be stored there. Moving from public to private cloud enables them to unlock the value of all their data — and to avoid vendor lock-in. Public cloud providers make it very easy to get your data into the cloud and very hard to get it out, often to the surprise of their customers.
The private cloud also allows organizations to define their own edge based on business objectives, not where their cloud provider’s closest region is located. If you’re a local police department, for example, your edge is your city’s border. You shouldn’t have to send your data to the public cloud two states away.
If you’ve moved from the enterprise data center to the public cloud, does the idea of moving some or all of your workloads to a private cloud feel like taking a step back? It shouldn’t. Request a Platina Command Center demo today.
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