More on 'defining the cloud'
Phil Wainewright recently posted a blog delivering some useful cloud definitions. In reference to multi-tenancy, Phil says: Multi-tenancy. Sharing a single, pooled, operational instance of the entire top-to-bottom infrastructure is more than simply a vendor convenience; it’s the only way to really achieve cloud scale. Look beyond the individual application or service and consider also the surrounding as-a-service infrastructure and any connecting framework to other cloud resources.
Understand the value of having all of that infrastructure constantly tuned and refreshed to keep pace with the demands of its diverse user base across hundreds or even thousands of tenants. The most conservative among them will constantly probe for potential risks and weaknesses. The most progressive will clamor for new functionality to be brought into production as rapidly as possible. Every tenant benefits from sharing the collective results of those two extremes and all points in-between, keeping the shared infrastructure both battle-hardened and future-proofed.Every tweak and enhancement is instantly available to every tenant as soon as it’s live.
Cloud scale. It’s no accident that cloud architectures are multi-tenant — just look at Google, Amazon, Facebook and all the rest. If you start from a need to perform at cloud scale, you build a multi-tenant infrastructure. It’s the only way to deliver the walk-up, on-demand, elastic scalability of the cloud with the 24×7 reliability and performance that the environment demands. Cloud scale consists of all of this globally connected operational capacity, coupled with the bandwidth and open APIs required to effortlessly interact with other resources and opportunities and platforms as they become available in the global public cloud.
A computing architecture can have all the other attributes of cloud, but without this cloud scale dimension, it will not be able to keep pace with the operational demands, the overwhelming connectivity and the continuous rapid evolution of the cloud environment. A number of cloud definitions have been touted, but this one is the most straight forward and accurate that we’ve seen. A good starting point for companies considering a move to the cloud.
