The 5 Attributes of Private Cloud

This post started out as a response to the Wikibon post on “True Private Clouds.” The Wikibon team is defining what a Private Cloud looks like from a product perspective. I’m defining what a Private Cloud looks like from an enterprise IT team’s perspective. Instead of writing a response to the Wikibon post, I thought I’d cut to the chase and offer thoughts directly. 

Characteristics of a Private Cloud
– Built on a hybrid infrastructure
A hybrid infrastructure is the physical layer of the infrastructure that is dynamically provisioned or de-provisioned based on the use case. Today it may serve as nodes for Network Function Virtualization and tomorrow it may be Docker Container hosts. 
– Software Defined Infrastructure
In addition to the hybrid nature of the infrastructure, it’s also software defined. The configuration state of the infrastructure is managed by an intelligent software stack. IE transitioning from NFV to Docker Container is managed by a software controller. 
– Service Catalog
A defined service catalog is available. Examples of catalog items are t-shirt sized VM, Containers via an image repository, and WordPress instances. 
– API Accessible
Any service provided by the Private Cloud is consumable via API. Any option in provisioning a catalog item should be configurable via API. 
– Dedicated Resources
Guaranteed organizational level physical segregation.