Why Compromise Your Public Cloud Experience?

Have you used a public cloud? The experience as a developer is truly fantastic. Enter your credit card information and go. Need more resources? Click. Tear down a server and start over? Click. Want APIs for granular access to configure and automate every part of your deployments exactly the way you need them? No problem. Built-in integration with the modern tools and platforms you’re using? Of course.

Traditional IT vs Cloud

Compare that to traditional infrastructure where it takes phone calls or tickets, approvals, and many different platforms that typically aren’t integrated just to get access to servers. Automation is difficult or impossible. Moving fast as a developer just isn’t something you can do. You spend your time wrangling the infrastructure instead of building your app.

The public cloud experience for a developer is liberating. It’s easy, fast, and predictable. It helps them deliver on their promises to the business by removing any obstacles to the resources they need.

Smart companies are freeing their development teams from traditional IT models and helping them move fast by taking advantage of cloud.

Compromise Required?

But what about security? Economics? Control? Do you have to trade those things for a public cloud experience? Until recently, many companies felt they needed to compromise. They could give their developers fast access to resources in the cloud, but that meant costs, security, and control were—well—out of control.

Private cloud has long been an option for companies that didn’t want to trade letting their developers move “fast” for purposes of security, economics, and control. But most companies that went down a private cloud path did so by driving it from their infrastructure teams. They likely built and operated what they called a private cloud using traditional virtualization platforms that provided some aspect of self-service access and maybe basic APIs. But that didn’t deliver a public cloud experience that’s easy, fast and predictable.

It was self-service traditional IT, built and run like traditional IT, which is very different from a public cloud experience. For many traditional enterprise applications and many companies, a traditional IT-led private cloud experience is exactly what they need. But for teams, apps, and companies looking for a public cloud experience, you need a fundamentally different approach.

Private Cloud that “Just Works”

Enter Metacloud. Founded in 2011 and acquired by Cisco in September 2014, the Metacloud team set out to deliver a true public cloud experience, privately–in the customer’s data center, behind their firewall. Making an early choice to base the Metacloud solution on OpenStack® was absolutely the right decision, as adoption of OpenStack-powered clouds has exceeded expectations in nearly every industry and geography.

Now available worldwide as Cisco OpenStack® Private Cloud, we deliver a remotely engineered and operated private cloud — built for developers. If you like public cloud, you’ll love what the Metacloud team built.

Full self-service access to cloud compute, storage, and network resources — available through an easy to use web portal, OpenStack APIs, the command line, or integrated out of the box into your favorite DevOps and development platforms. Best of all? You don’t need to spend a minute being distracted with how the platform is engineered, built, upgraded, and operated. Like public cloud, it just works. It’s easy, fast, and predictable. You get to spend your time building and scaling your apps, and moving as fast as you want to.

Your administrator and application operations teams will love Cisco OpenStack® Private Cloud, too. With heavy experience in large-scale operations, the Metacloud team knows it’s important to understand what’s going on behind the scenes. That’s why we include tools to help your administrators know what’s happening at all levels of the stack. You get the ability to assess and optimize performance of applications, by evaluating the health of your hypervisors, OpenStack services, network traffic, and capacity — all without having to be experts in how they work.

Cloud Operations are Key

The public cloud experience has a lot to do with how you use the platform. But what makes a public cloud truly great is the smart teams behind the scenes. Every time you log in, the experience gets a little better. Issues become visible and get fixed before they become problems. The lights stay on.

With over three years of experience running production private clouds in our customers’ data centers, and over 20 billion automated, real-time monitoring checks performed by our operations team to date, enterprise customers and fast growing startups alike are trusting us with their mission-critical workloads.

Tapjoy is a great example. They moved from AWS and SoftLayer to a hybrid model using Metacloud, and now they’re using our solution to deliver nearly a trillion mobile ad network transactions this year. They improved efficiency over AWS by 3-5 times. They gained control and security. Best of all, their development teams gave up none of the benefits of public cloud that were important to them as they moved to Metacloud.

Tapjoy continues to use AWS for the ad-serving portion of their platform (peaks and spikes), and relies on Cisco OpenStack® Private Cloud for their big data and back-end analytics components. With billions of transactions flowing through their global platform each day, it’s safe to say they’re running at web scale.  The “just works” public cloud experience we deliver gives them the freedom and speed to continue to innovate on their applications while we take care of engineering and operating their private cloud. Read more about Tapjoy’s story here.

Bottom Line

Delivering a public cloud experience to your development teams means far more than just giving them self-service access and a few APIs. A big part of it is changing 30 years of enterprise IT mindset about where your control points and policies are enforced. Traditional IT enforced them at the resource and server level. True cloud gives you the opportunity to give your development teams the freedom to use the resources how they need them, while your business objectives (and policies) are being delivered at the application layer.

Done right, private cloud can absolutely deliver a public cloud experience, without having to compromise on the economics, control, and security you get from having your workloads and data in your own data center, behind your own firewall.

For more information on Cisco OpenStack® Private Cloud, click here.

You can also connect with me on Twitter: @scottsanchez or @CiscoCloud