Building private clouds: 3 dos and 3 don’ts

The patterns of success are emerging around the use of private cloud computing within the enterprise, and it’s time to begin sharing what’s working and what’s not working. Here are three each of my dos and don’ts.

Do make sure to leverage SOA. While many look at private clouds as simple virtualized resources, those building successful private clouds are working from the business requirements, to the architecture, and then to the solution. Without good architectural context, you don’t know how and when you’re successful with your private cloud efforts.

Do consider performance. I’ve seen many cases where the use of private clouds has killed application performance. In many instances, applications are not designed to live in multitenant and virtualized environments, and many applications need to be rearchitected to operate effectively.

Do consider security and governance. I’ve been beating this dead horse on the blog for months, and one last whack won’t hurt. Security and governance are systemic to the architecture.

Don’t preselect private cloud software based on what’s popular. There are a few camps out there, the EMC VMware camp and the open source camp (Xen, Eucalyptus, and so on), whose members will use only VMware or open source products, respectively. There’s no middle ground as far as these camps are concerned. But truth be told, there are very good technology and business reasons to use each solution, so make sure to be open-minded, and do some prototyping.

Don’t call it “elastic scalability.” You’re only scaling out to the limits of the hardware in the rack, which is typically a handful of servers within most enterprises. Thus, your scaling is limited as well. Private clouds are not public clouds: You can’t scale by credit card.

Don’t let the vendor drive your solution. Not that many private clouds exist, so it’s tempting to ask your vendor, including those from “big software,” to come in and build your private cloud for you, from the architecture to the solution. If you do that, don’t be surprised that everything the vendor sells not only fits in their proposed solution but is required by it. The vendor has a conflict of interest, so leaving the decision in its hands usually results in a solution that fits its sales needs, not your business needs.

This article, “Building private clouds: 3 dos and 3 don’ts,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of David Linthicum’s Cloud Computing blog and follow the latest developments on cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.