Beware the bait and switch in the public cloud

Even with all the great new product and vision announcements at the VMworld and Dreamforce vendor conferences this week, two announcements will make it more difficult for developers and CIOs to leap into their next cloud investment with confidence. Google, EMC VMware, and Salesforce.com, three vendors vying for cloud leadership status, share the blame for that lowered confidence.

Preview pricing has no place in the enterprise

Google products are well known for remaining in beta status well into their public life cycles. The beta, or preview, moniker is fun and cutesy — until you’re trying to establish an enterprise foothold, which Google App Engine is attempting.

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The problem with betas and previews, aside from the lack of SLA support for enterprise production workloads, is the uncertain pricing for the eventual “general availability” (GA) products and offerings. This point became crystal clear when Google announced new pricing for its App Engine cloud platform.

The Hacker News and Google Groups message boards dedicated to App Engine are filled with developers complaining about dramatic cost increases of 50 percent to more than 2,800 percent. Is anyone surprised by what the company that got socked with a 28-fold increase decided to do? “We are moving 22 servers away. Already started the process to move to AWS.”

Enterprise developer and CIO confidence in using pre-GA cloud services definitely takes a hit with Google’s new pricing. Amazon Web Services appears to be the beneficiary of Google’s new pricing.

Complex cloud pricing poses a barrier for enterprises

It’s been said before that Google, for all its greatness, just doesn’t understand the enterprise software market; take a look at the current App Engine pricing model for proof.

Pricing per usage of bandwidth or compute instances is increasingly well understood by IT. In fact, these were the key elements of the original App Engine pricing model when the service was still in preview mode.

Pricing for five different API uses, as Google has introduced with the new App Engine pricing, is overly complex at best. Does the priced API model better reflect Google’s expenses and provide developers and CIOs an opportunity to reduce their costs by using cost-effective APIs? Yes. But it’s also confusing and complex. In some respects, the new pricing model feels like Google let really smart engineers, or actuaries, set the terms as a fun math exercise.

For enterprises, the dramatically increased fees and complexity of App Engine’s new pricing model will become the cautionary tale to those pushing an enterprise to adopt a cloud offering before the costs and pricing metrics are established.

Cloud leaders aim to control the entire technology stack

The second announcement, or lack thereof, that will affect cloud adoption is the news that “VMforce is dead,” to borrow words from Gartner analyst Yefim Natis.

A little over a year ago, Salesforce.com and VMware made news by announcing a strategic alliance to let VMware and Spring developers build and deploy applications onto Salesforce.com’s Force.com cloud platform. This week, Natis broke the news about VMforce:

Yesterday at VMworld conference Tod Nielsen, a VMware executive leading its platform efforts, had announced that VMforce will not be delivered, CloudFoundry technology will not run in the Salesforce.com data center, and users of CloudFoundry.com will be enabled to access Database.com in some unspecified way as a compensating feature. Today Byron Sebastian, Salesforce.com’s platform executive, confirmed it. VMforce is dead.

Yefim repeats a long-standing Gartner maxim: “The only real partnerships are acquisitions.” Salesforce.com went out and acquired Heroku to replace the VMware capabilities in VMforce.

Platform vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP control the entire technology stack underlying their platforms. As Natis points out, this strategy will be replicated in the cloud arena. It’ll happen because cloud vendors such as Salesforce.com are vying to join the ranks of platform vendors.

Therefore, enterprises and developers relying on cloud providers whose platforms are a collection of partnerships and strategic alliances are walking a slippery slope. When these partnerships break down, as in the case of VMforce, developer and IT investments in applications that relied on these partnerships will need to be migrated, rewritten, or thrown away, resulting in wasted time, effort, and money. Why start that journey?

Enterprise developers and CIOs attending or paying attention to the news from VMworld or Dreamforce 2011 have lots of exciting products and services to consider spending their time and money on. However, they should be wary of doing so without clear and long-term reliable pricing and wary of using platforms that a single vendor can’t deliver. This higher level of scrutiny is good for the cloud market, for clients, and for vendors.

I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

This article, “Beware the bait and switch in the public cloud,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Savio Rodrigues’s Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.