After only a few weeks of investigation, proof of concepts of Cloudstack, Openstack, Chef, and all the other buzzwords and sexy products we give it a go. In a few months time we will not be offering only public clouds, like we do for a number of years now. We will be building something new as well.
This is what we have come up with. 1. Very specialized heterogeneous clouds. Private ones that run totally on own hardware. No shared components whatsoever. The customers are in total control of their stack. On every level. Technology, change windows, audit and control, security, you name it. But next to that we will implement “the mission critical cloud”. A cloud that has all the pre conditions that we need to meet to have Safe Harbours, to avoid government rules like the patriot act, a future Sopa, but most important that meets all the quality goals that we aim for. A shared cloud that is ISO27001 certified. That can be SAS70 if asked by customers. This cloud will be for a subset of our customers. Think about the following scenario’s.
a) My online sales shop needs extra capacity for Christmas. Possible solution: Use the private cloud acceptance systems capacity for production and use ec2 api’s to move acceptnace temporary to the “Mission Critical Cloud”.
b) My campaign platform is less critical than my webshop. And next to that, my campaigns only run a month or two. It would be a waist to host dedicated hardware for this. This would be an excellent candidate for the mission critical cloud.
c) A bit more far fetched. We as a company want to do good for the society. Call it sustainable, call it green. Wouldn’t it be great to have some cloud capacity that we can donate to the greater benefit of this world? Example given, A university project, a big fundraiser, a small start up in a less developed country that needs a head start.
d) …
Like i said, interesting times to come. This company I work for is great. we can reinvent ourselves over and over again. Lets see if we can amaze our customers with this initiative.
btw if you have marvelous ideas about what we can use the mission critical cloud for, please let me know.
