Whether you’re building an enterprise private cloud or buying a public cloud service, the underlying architecture of what you end up with will have an impact on what you can do.
“People have a tendency not to think about architecture,” noted David Linthicum, senior VP at Cloud Technology Partners in Cambridge, Mass. and a speaker in the Cloud and Virtualization track at Interop New York 2013. And cloud vendors, including Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine, tend not to disclose much about their underlying architectures.
Clouds may have some elements in common, but the specific goals behind the selection of their parts and their method of assembly actually differ greatly. “The architectural differences can show up in a big way,” Linthicum warned. When little information is available from the vendor, he added, potential cloud users may have to “play private detective to discover what is going on behind the scenes.”
The author of 13 books and a frequent conference speaker, Linthicum is former principal of Blue Mountain Labs, a cloud computing consulting firm. Linthicum will speak on “Getting Cloud Architecture Right the First Time” at 2:45 p.m. Oct. 2 at Interop.