How to chooose between custom and commodity clouds

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Brent Bensten.

The public cloud is finally gaining acceptance. Freed from the shackles of the IT department, employees and their business units can now obtain the resources they need at a low cost of entry and hassle. But what’s good for the individual is not necessarily good for the enterprise. As familiarity with cloud architectures rises, so does the awareness that the public cloud does not suit every IT function, particularly when it comes to high-volume, low-latency applications like big data and rich media processing.

Cloud wars and the cost of commoditization

The main drawback of running high-end applications on public cloud resources is lack of customization. This is primarily due to the race-to-the- bottom pricing that top providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others have engaged in recently. It is now possible to find storage resources for about 2 cents per gigabyte per month and database operations for about a penny per 1,000 transactions…

Ultimately, this price war will influence all IT spending, whether for Web-based services or end-to-end IaaS (infrastructure as a service) ecosystems. From a purely operational perspective, it tends to mask two crucial aspects of the public cloud: First, the resources available for bottom dollar are usually low quality — with limited availability, latent performance, and other detriments that make them unsuitable for modern production environments. Second and even more important is the fact that most public clouds are built on commodity infrastructure designed to support low-cost, scale-out, virtual architectures…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/how-chooose-between-custom-and-commodity-clouds-245018