Here I continue the 2009 predictions series started with my IaaS/PaaS 2009 post.

In the world of cloud computing we are living in very exciting times. Cloud Computing is the buzz word of the day even though the segment is barely two years old. Interest in private clouds is even more astonishing considering that these barely exist at all and we are likely to be only entering the first days of real developments in this area.

In a nutshell, private clouds are Amazon-like cost-effective and scalable infrastructures but run by companies themselves within their firewalls.

There are a couple of reasons why this is an interesting option for a lot of enterprises out there:

1. Some data and systems belong on premise due to security and legal concerns, or simply companies wanting to stay in control.
2. The story of not having to provision and manage hardware resources when using public clouds from Amazon and others sounds great but the reality is that enterprises already have hardware of their own. Instead of tearing down datacenters in which they have been investing all these years – why not start to use them more efficiently?

These are the reasons why both enterprise and government structures (you don’t expect Department of Defense to use Amazon for their apps, do you?) are very interested in pursuing the private cloud option, and analysts like Gartner are giving the concept their high blessing.

Surprisingly enough, I would argue that no real solution is currently obvious on the market.

VMware is working on their Datacenter OS and vCloud initiatives, and has had LabManager offering for a long time. Microsoft is obviously happy sell you their Hyper-V and Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager. And then there are quite a few startups like 3Tera (grid operating system), ParaScale (disk-storage aggregation software), Cassatt (resource-pooling technology), Elastra (cloud-like application management inside a company’s firewall) and so on.

However, I believe that the real solution is yet to come.

Here are the key characteristics that private clouds should have from my perspective:

1. More than a hypervisor and VM management tool: storage services, standard scalability APIs such as load balancing and queuing, and so on.
2. Unified approach with public clouds: APIs, software stack, licensing, virtual machine formats (in case of IaaS), development tools…

Unified public/private approach is important for a few reasons:

• It would provide for scenarios like outbursting (using internal clouds most of the time and public ones for peak loads) and freedom to go to external vendors and back.
• From development perspective, ability to write application once and sell it both as SaaS offering from a public cloud and software one for private deployments will stimulate software vendors to create solutions for the platform.
• And obviously the more unified the technology gets the easier it would be for in-house developers and IT to have skills necessary to develop and manage applications of their own.

There are companies working on elements of private cloud systems of the future but there is nothing close to being a real solution with Amazon-like acceptance (still curious to see what happens to Eucalyptus in 09 by the way).

Will 2009 be the year when private clouds really take off? I seriously doubt so – there seems to be a lot of work ahead to make this a reality. However, there definitely is demand (for the reasons I mentioned above), analysts’ blessing, and a lot companies rushing in to deliver a solution. Which means that no matter how early things are we will see a lot of interest developments in this area in 2009.

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