Cloud Application Layer Part III - Up & Down

	Ph. D. Julio Fernandez Vilas
	¿Any comments? jfvilas@gmail.com

Let's recall now the concepts of public cloud and private cloud, which are easily understandable if we really understand the relationship between the Internet (public) and (private) Intranet. When a company uses the public cloud, and then publishes services internally in the organization using the same technologies, i.e., in a private cloud, the company is acting as both a client consuming cloud services and a provider that offers services to its own iT services.

This is important when assessing the costs, as it will allow the consumption billed individually, affecting a business unit costs associated with the services they use.

Moreover, we must consider that the company is a living entity, constantly changing, and the fact of offering services from a cloud, whether private or public, is a key factor in making changes to services. That is, we endow the company a considerable amount of flexibility, since domestic service consumers do not know whether such services are being offered from inside or outside the organization.

In a last step in the adoption process of cloud technologies it is very important to have bothered to make a good design of services consumed in the form of a private cloud. If the design is good, the migration to a cloud service can be done easily. It is important to focus on a key concept for this migration to the cloud be done easily: STANDARDIZATION.

We need to design our private cloud services so that they are compatible with the public cloud. When we talk about compatibility or standardization, it is important to have a clear understanding of the layer of cloud technology we are focusing. For example, if we are thinking about IaaS, we have to make sure we use only x86 architectures, we are restricted to Windows and Linux, standard virtualization technologies, iSCSI, etc.

If you are thinking in SaaS (cloud email, for example), which is standardized is functionality. That is, we can migrate our on-premises platform (Exchange, Lotus, etc.) to an email platform in the cloud (Gmail, Outlook.com, etc. ..), provided that it assures me that the functionality that I will get on the new platform is at least the same as I have on the current platform. We should note that in the SaaS projects we will always find a CAPEX amount in the project corresponding to migration.

And all this in terms of going up to the cloud. And what about going down from the cloud? If we have taken into account everything said so far, the download process (or even transfer to another provider) is exactly the same. Remember that we are talking about going up to cloud from a starting point that assumes we are already working on private cloud.