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As a leading proponent of the OpenStack cloud management framework, Metacloud has been a vocal advocate for private versus public cloud computing. Now, Metacloud is extending the reach of its services for managing OpenStack clouds into the realm of hosted cloud computing environments.
This week Metacloud announced that it is extending its managed services capabilities for OpenStack environments to instances of OpenStack running on servers hosted by Internap.
Metacloud CEO Sean Lynch says hosted environments are a natural extension of private cloud computing deployments, which he argues that over the long haul are fundamentally more economical than the public cloud. In a public cloud environment, all the economic benefits that are derived from advances in Moore’s Law are enjoyed by the service provider. In a private cloud scenario, those advances accrue to the organization that used its capital budget to build that cloud, says Lynch.
To facilitate the adoption of hybrid cloud computing, Metacloud via Internap is now extending the management services it provides for the OpenStack environment to private clouds running both on-premise and in a hosted environment. Over time, other hosted instances of OpenStack will follow.
For the immediate future, Lynch says IT organizations will opt to deploy application workloads in the private cloud scenario that make the most sense. But as hybrid cloud computing continues to evolve, it’s also clear that workloads will be dynamically moving between those environments.
While there’s a lot of debate over just how ready OpenStack is for the enterprise, Lynch says that the Metacloud service is designed to accelerate that adoption by providing OpenStack management expertise as a service. The degree to which IT organizations will first move to OpenStack and then secondarily opt to outsource the management of it remains to be seen. But as the expense of private cloud management continues to rise, IT organizations will likely be more willing to explore all of their options.
