Cloud computing holds much promise, of that there is little doubt. One of the areas that has long been suggested as benefiting from cloud computing is public services. Here, the scalability, accessibility and cost of cloud computing, and public cloud in particular, seem a marriage made in heaven. However, one of the key aspects of any public service deal must be a clear definition of how an organisation might extract itself from such a service deal, and this is where it gets interesting.
So, you are a public service provider and you are about to embark on a deal with a public cloud provider that will extend the reach and capability of the services you provide to the public, but you must ensure that there is a clear method defined to end the deal and move those services to another provider without significant loss of service or, more importantly, data. The sensible thing to do is look for an open, standards based platform for your services that ensures interoperability with the other standards based providers. However, that may be an over simplification, according to some in the market.
In conversation with one expert from a major platform as a service (PaaS) provider, the claim was made that to ensure full interoperability and transferability would be to limit the level of exploitation of that platform, potentially reducing the capability of your own services.
He explained, for example, that if you were to ensure that your applications which rely on a database performed at their best, it would not make sense to have that application sitting on a virtual machine (VM) talking to another VM that hosted your database. Instead, it might be better to have the application speak directly to a discrete database instance hosted on the platform’s own database implementation. This would have benefits in scale, resilience, performance and management. However, when it comes to extricating your database from this arrangement, should you wish to move providers, even though it may be an industry standard based database, such as a SQL database, the flavour of that database may not be the same as the next provider and therefore, despite the interoperability, the move may require some reworking of the data to ensure that it all works again. But this takes time and costs money, meaning that it may actually be a barrier to moving at all. Moving providers, even between ones that adhere to open, standards based platforms, may not be that easy because of nuances of implementation and differentiation that mean that it may not be as straightforward as simply take images of VMs and database schemas and dumps in file format from one provider to another.
While the expert argued that this was not a bad thing as fully engaging with the provider would ensure greater levels of service, capability and performance, the downside seems to be that a clear, simple exit strategy may be the casualty of this level of engagement.
This in itself, I would argue, may be enough to make public service bodies wary of cloud deployments. Whether that is justified or not remains to be seen, but given the rigour with which such bodies must define disengagement as much as engagement with any provider, experience would suggest that this part of argument could easily be weighted to make it sound like an argument against rather than for cloud computing, were the people investigating so inclined.
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