Deploying your cloud

Deciding Whether to Consume or Build

A critical decision for any organization planning to use or build a cloud is whether to consume services from an existing cloud service provider or to build your own cloud. Every customer is unique in their goals and requirements as well as their existing legacy datacenter environment, so the consume-versus-build decision is not always easy to make. Cloud systems integrators and leading cloud providers have learned that there is often customer confusion with regard to the terms public cloud, virtual private cloud, managed cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud.

Figure 1-1 presents a simplified decision tree (from the perspective of you as the cloud customer or client) that explains different consume-versus-build options and how they map to public, private, and virtual private clouds.

Figure 1-1. The consume-versus-build decision tree

Consumption

Consumption of cloud services refers to an organization purchasing services from a cloud service provider, normally a public cloud. In this consumption model, there are little or no up-front capital expenses; customers incur service fees on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, which cover subscribed services and resource usage. This model requires no on-premises computing infrastructure be installed at the customer’s facility or added to its network.

Also understand that ...