Hacker News Reader

Comment by mey | Hacker News Reader

Quick note, they define Private Cloud as "Customer’s private cloud environment on a cloud provider" but that is not the definition I go by. Just a heads up while reading.

I would define Private Cloud as a non-bare metal solution on Prem in a traditional colo setting where hardware is owned by the company in question. Hybrid Cloud would be a Private Cloud and Public Cloud bridged in some way.

View on HN

To me, private cloud means a cloud like infrastructure run by your own ops people, either on-premise or in a colo, running on dedicated hardware you own or rent.

Funny how definitions diverge here.

The definition in the blog post I agree least with (secluded environment on a cloud provider).

Where I work we are building a private cloud but the hardware will be all provided and managed by one of the main server manufacturers. Its private because no other company will use these servers and they reside within our firewalls. But we rent the infrastructure and are not responsible for maintaining it or capacity management. We are just charged based on our consumption of it. I would say that to be a cloud it also needs an automation layer on top like openstack or vRA

I would agree that would be called private cloud. I guess it needs a definition behind "cloud provider" according to the author. I think hardware solely for your use (including networking/disk) would be my minimum definition, but not bare-metal. I'm coming at this from a security boundary perspective and where liabilities are. Where provisioning of resources can be dynamic and moved.

The different meanings for different people are interesting..

Where I work we refer to a product offering as "private cloud" that means we will run the software on their own AWS account. This keeps their data separate from other customers and allows extra security(restricted access to US employees, restricted access via VPN, etc).

I'm also an ex cloud engineer(as in building, operating, etc) so I understand the hosting meaning of "private cloud" to mean a cloud under control of the user(software and hardware), such as a company running an Open Stack install in own datacenter or colo.

Count me among those for whom "private cloud" effectively means a colo solution (a sibling comment[1] mentions another version of this, which I would also consider a private cloud since it's on dedicated hardware). I would call what you first referred to as a "managed cloud" service.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12697390

Reply on news.ycombinator.com