私有云pk公有云——这场战争你赢不了丨双语

原文作者：Matt Asay

译者：李哲

关键词：私有云，公有云

核心提示：私有云还是公有云？这已经是老生常谈了。本文观点认为，亚马逊、谷歌、微软等企业提供的公有云平台，将在与私有云的创新竞争中保持完胜。

上周，微软、亚马逊、Alphabet（谷歌）的财报相继出台，宣示了三家公司云业务增长的强劲势头（增长率分别为116%、55%和“所有产品线中最高的增长率”）。然而，事实还不止如此。

这些公司还宣布，支撑云服务的基础设施建设是投资重点。投资数额是其他公司望尘莫及的。那么，这是否意味着你的私有云已经沦落成“二等云公民”了？很不幸，事实基本如此。因为你的创新速度完全跟不上。

“但是我可以像谷歌一样运营啊！”

“服务器拥护者”过去常常声称，企业的很多工作不能转入公有云，因为有安全、性能或者其他方面的顾虑。随着这些顾虑的烟消云散，他们又转而论道：“精明的企业可以更高效地运行它们的基础设施，而且比使用公有云更经济。”

真的是这样吗？

对成百上千的大规模的服务器进行高效的管理，不是不可能。如果能做到，当然很好。根据451 Research的研究报告，对于那些能够高效管理大规模服务器的企业来说，使用私有云的总体拥有成本（TCO）比使用公有云更低。

但是，这种优势始终无法与亚马逊、谷歌、微软等公司产生的规模经济相提并论。规模经济意味着更多更好的硬件、软件和人才。谷歌宣布，到2017年，云服务将成为公司最大的投资领域和人数增长领域之一，而且将在下一年覆盖八个新地区。微软已经覆盖了38个地区，在不久的将来还会进军法国。

至于亚马逊？谷歌和微软只能相形见绌了。

然而，规模经济不仅仅意味着花更少的钱，买更多的硬件。正如Randy Bias所说，“创新率和开发率才是这些公有云企业规模经济的真正意义所在。”想知道这句话的真正含义吗？看看这些公司发布的开源和研究项目吧！这只是它们的数据中心研发投入的冰山一角。

在建立起根深蒂固的“云DNA”之前，不管你的公司有多大，都不可能和公有云同日而语。就像亚马逊的CFO Brian Olsavsky在公司的电话会议上强调的，“我们做这行的时间比其他人都长，这些时间都被用来完善我们的产品和服务了。”

如果，你还没被说服的话……

当然，即使你不再幻想着与公有云的灵活性和创新性相媲美，仍然要把工作流保持在自己的数据中心内，也是可以理解的。如果是这样的话，你可以考虑投资被Forrester称为私有云的业界标准和“安全赌注”的OpenStack。

如果你不是一家电信公司或者沃尔玛，你可能会选择在OpenStack上进行开发和测试工作（dev-and-test workloads）。根据最近的调查，在所有使用OpenStack的企业中，89%服务的用户少于1,000位。没错，开发和测试工作很重要，而且可以鼓舞你在云领域的自信心，为生产工作（production workloads）铺平道路。但是，OpenStack还远没有像AWS或微软Azure一样拥有如此广泛的用户。

而且它永远也不会。因为OpenStack服务的用户群在不断缩小，这些人相信他们需要有自己的基础设施，就像上个世纪初的制造商相信要有自己的发电厂一样。

对私有数据中心的需求是可以理解的，但是，当像通用这样的公司都在宣布要把90%的工作流转入公有云的时候，我们是否应该考虑一下，把默认设置从“私有云”调整为 “公有云”。

亚马逊、谷歌、微软……它们将在创新的竞争中保持完胜。

英文原文：

This past week Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google) all reported earnings, and all announced impressive growth (116 percent, 55 percent, and “the highest percentage growth of all its product lines,” respectively) in their public cloud businesses. That, however, isn’t all they announced.

These same companies announced major investments into the infrastructure powering their clouds, investments that no single company can hope to match. Does this mean your private cloud is a second-class cloud citizen? Almost definitely. You simply can’t innovate fast enough.

But I can run like Google!

It used to be that server-huggers argued that a wide array of enterprise workloads wouldn’t go to the public cloud due to security, performance, or other concerns. These concerns keep evaporating, leaving apologists to declare, “Well, savvy enterprises can run their infrastructure more efficiently and save money over the public cloud.”

Really?

Sure, it’s possible that you’re awesome at efficiently managing hundreds or thousands of servers at scale. If so, good for you. In a summary of a 451 Research report, Brandon Butler of Network World notes, “Generally speaking, if any organization has the expertise to manage a large number of servers at a high level of utilization, then on-premises, customer-managed private clouds can have a total cost of ownership (TCO) advantage compared to public clouds.”

Ultimately, there’s no way you can keep up with the relentless economies of scale of an Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. As RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady has called out:

[Public cloud providers’] variable costs decrease due to their ability to purchase in larger quantities; their fixed costs are amortized over a higher volume customer base; their relative efficiency can increase as scale drives automation and improved processes; their ability to attract and retain talent increases in proportion to the difficulty of the technical challenges imposed; and so on.

This translates into more and better hardware, software, and people. Google, for example, revealed that “cloud [will] be one of our largest areas of investment and head count growth” in 2017, also stating that the company will add eight new regions next year. Microsoft, for its part, has 38 regions and will add France in the near future. The company also announced it’s spending heavily at the expense of higher profits: “Given the growth opportunity in cloud, we increased our operating expenses by 21 percent … to fund cloud engineering, sales capacity, and developer engagement.”

And Amazon? It dwarfs them all.

But “economies of scale” isn’t merely about the ability to buy more hardware for less. As Randy Bias concludes, “The rate of innovation and development at these public clouds is where the true economies of scale reside.” Want a taste of what he means? Check out the impressive open source and/or research projects these companies keep releasing, a hint of the R&D that goes into their datacenters.

I don’t care how big your company is — until you spend the years building up that institutional cloud DNA, you simply cannot hope to match the public clouds. As Amazon’s CFO Brian Olsavsky stressed on the company’s earnings call, “We’ve been in this business a long time, longer than anyone else, and we’ve used that time to make our products and services better.”

Still not budging

That said, you might not be convinced. Undoubtedly there are valid reasons to keep workloads within your datacenter, even if you can’t hope to keep up with the public clouds’ agility or innovation. As such, you may consider investing in OpenStack, which as Forrester points out is the default for private clouds and finally a “safe bet.”

Unless you’re a telco or Walmart, however, you’re probably going to stick with dev-and-test workloads on OpenStack, with 89 percent of enterprises recently surveyed using OpenStack to service fewer than 1,000 users. Yes, dev-and-test workloads are important and help breed confidence in the cloud, paving the way for production workloads. But for all the hoopla around OpenStack, it hasn’t come close to finding the broad audience that AWS or Microsoft Azure have.

Nor will it — OpenStack serves the ever-shrinking base of people who believe they need to own their infrastructure, akin to the manufacturers at the turn of the last century that felt they needed to own their power plants.

There are legitimate needs for private datacenters, but when a company like GE announces it’s moving 90 percent of its workloads to the public cloud, it’s probably time to start setting the default to “public cloud” instead of “private cloud.” They’re going to out-innovate you every single time.

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