The Enterprise Cloud

Chapter 3. Deploying Your Cloud

Key topics in this chapter:

• The consume-versus-build decision

• Building your own cloud—lessons learned, including architecture examples and guidance

• Managing scope, releases, and customer expectations

• Redundancy, continuity, and disaster recovery

• Using existing operational staff during deployment

• Deployment best practices

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 3-1 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. For definitions and comparisons of each cloud deployment model, refer to Chapter 1.

Figure 3-1. The consume-versus-build decision tree

To better understand the consume-versus-build options that are ...