Venyu Blog

“The Lady, or the Tiger?” is a much-anthologized short story written by Frank R. Stockton for publication in the magazine The Century in 1882. “The Lady, or the Tiger?” has come into the English language as an allegorical expression, a shorthand indication or signifier for a problem that is unsolvable.

The plot revolves around a semi-barbaric king of an ancient land used an unusual form of punishment for offenders in his kingdom. The offender would be placed in an arena where his only way out would be to go through one of two doors. Behind one door was a beautiful woman hand-picked by the king and behind the other was a fierce tiger. The offender was then asked to pick one of the doors without knowing what was behind it. If he picked the door with the woman behind it, then he was declared innocent but was also required to marry the woman, regardless of previous marital status. If he picked the door with the tiger behind it, though, then he was deemed guilty and the tiger would rip him to pieces. In the end Stockton doesn’t reveal the offender’s choice, only that he made one, leaving the reader to decide the outcome.

As the debate rages on between proponents on both sides of the private vs. public clouds debate, a kind of one-two punch —expository of the classic Lady or The Tiger tale— was recently delivered by two leading and respected “cloudwriters.”

Writing in Zdnet in a column entitled Private cloud discredited, part 2, Phil Wainewright — using what he calls the “coalface testimony” of a pair of enterprise cloud pioneers — Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix and Christian Reilly, a global systems engineer said Netflix HQ – provides the evidence he needed to declare “private clouds comprehensively discredited.”

In Cockcroft’s words, “There is no technical reason for private cloud to exist.” Or as Reilly put it, “it can bring efficiencies and value in areas where you can absolutely NOT get the stakeholder alignment and buy in that you need to deal with the $, FUD and internal politics that are barriers to public cloud.”

Wainewright points to Cockcroft’s post which systematically demolishes the arguments for public cloud:

• Too risky? “The bigger risk for Netflix was that we wouldn’t scale and have the agility to compete.”
• Not secure? “This is just FUD. The enterprise vendors … are sowing this fear, uncertainty and doubt in their customer base to slow down adoption of public clouds.”
• Loss of control? “What does it cost to build a private cloud, and how long does it take, and how many consultants and top tier IT ops staff do you have to hire? … allocate that money to the development organization, hire more developers and rewrite your legacy apps to run on the public cloud.”

He follows that up with Reilly’s pile-driver conclusion that “Building the private cloud that is devoid of any plan or funding to make architectural changes to today’s enterprise applications does not provide us any tangible transitional advantage, nor does it position our organization to make a move to public cloud.”

In a separate but equally provocative post in InfoWorld, David Linthicum rightly argues that private clouds are very much like traditional computing: You have to purchase your own hardware and software, configure all elements, and pay employees to watch over it as they would a data center or any other IT infrastructure. At that point a key advantage of public cloud computing (e.g. shared resources) is dramatically diminished.

On the other hand, with public clouds, said Linthicum, “You can be up and running in a short amount of time, you pay for only the resources you consume, and you don’t have to push yet another server into the data center.”

The irony isn’t lost on Linthicum: Starting with the public cloud removes much of the risk of moving to the cloud; you’re not making the large capital and labor investments and nervously awaiting the expected benefit. The costs of using the public cloud are low, and the payoff (especially the learning aspect) is high.

Linthicum concedes that recent news about public cloud computing woes including security concerns and reliability issues are not especially flattering to the technology. However, he also suggests those fears are overcome when you take into account the real costs and the real value private clouds versus public clouds. He believes, graciously even encouragingly, that the latter wins every time.

So, when it comes to private vs. public clouds, is it the Lady or the Tiger? Let us know which door you chose and whether, depending on which one you’ve opened, your organization is still in one piece.