New Massive Community Initiative from StratoScale: The Private Cloud Wiki

This project was quite the undertaking.

The wiki started with an intensive 6-months worth of research where the first stage was building a tree of over 200 sub-topics around private cloud technology including: private cloud architecture, strategy and economics; private cloud platforms like VMware vRealize and OpenStack; Cloud Management Platforms; virtualization strategies for private clouds; and modern data center architecture including hyperconvergence technology.

The Stratoscale team told VMblog they collected over 100,000 web pages that cover these subjects, hand-picked the most relevant ones for each category, and divided them into "content types" such as How To, Case Studies, Real Life Examples, Vendor Information, Product Comparisons, and so on.

The wiki is still in its infancy with around 60 content pages, but I’m told that new category pages are being added on a weekly basis.

Making Sense of the Space

If you search Google for any of these specific topics, you’ll get a bunch of products, some articles, pages from StackOverflow and similar sites, mixed up with pages that contain only a few lines, are unclear, out of date, or useless for other reasons.  It takes a tremendous amount of effort to sift through all that and really learn about the space.

Plus, there’s no context.  If you search for "private cloud deployment" you won’t be able to move up a level to learn about "private cloud operations and management", and see other related subjects like "private cloud security" and "private cloud orchestration", or drill down to learn about specific types of private cloud deployments, e.g. how to deploy OpenStack vs. VMware.

The Stratoscale wiki provides all of that and adds another layer of meaning above the basic indexing that Google provides.

When asked if this was simply going to be a Stratoscale effort or a one-sided conversation, the answer was unequivocally "no."  A central realization behind the wiki is that even though the company employs some of the world’s top cloud computing experts, Stratoscale early on realized that they aren’t the only ones writing about the space, and in many parts of this field, there are others who are more specialized.  They decided to bring all these community voices to the front stage and let visitors choose from a large variety of views and opinions – even those of their direct competitors.

This is a democratization of technical knowledge which can save a lot of time for the many professionals who are adopting and deepening their knowledge of modern cloud infrastructure.  I’m going to continue to watch this wiki grow and I plan on using it as one of my own educational resources.