Cloud of One

On whether website systems should be hosted in the public cloud,
or in a private cloud.

Much has been written in the last few years of the benefits of hosting applications in the public cloud, and examples exist of massive systems which could not exist any other way.

Public clouds, as provided by companies like Amazon, allow the delegation of the management of the hardware infrastructure, permit rapid scaling to cope with changes in demand, and require little upfront financial commitment by the user.

There are, however, several strategic problems with using the public cloud for commercial applications. Most are to do with you losing control: when there is a problem (and yes – public clouds have technical problems just as anyone else does) you are not a priority, just one of thousands of customers, and even if you could shout loud enough to gain their attention, your site is mixed up with everyone else’s sites on the servers in the cloud, so they couldn’t get you up and running any sooner anyway.

Sometimes cloud outages are terminal – the cloud provider suffers a catastrophic failure, and goes out of business, taking your site and data with it. This does not matter if you have spread your systems over multiple cloud providers, but at the moment they are still in their infancy, and interoperability isn’t a priority, so such risk-spreading isn’t easy.

A fundamental aspect to consider is data privacy. If the data is personal, or private, you may not want others looking at it, and indeed you may be under legal obligations to ensure they cannot. Yet by placing the information in the cloud, you are delegating that control to another organization, and whilst they might have no interest in your data, may be forced to hand over access to governmental organizations without informing you. And with clouds crossing national boundaries, that isn’t just your own government. Aside from national regulations, PCI regulations for card payment processing are fundamentally incompatible with the public cloud, as they require physical access to inspect the machines involved.

Architecting a site for the cloud is expensive, and constraining. The emphasis is too often on scalability, rather than functionality. Yet without functionality, sites are unlikely to become popular enough for scalability to be required.

The reality is, for most sites, there is no benefit to being on a public cloud, just a series of risks that can’t be controlled.

So if the public cloud isn’t appropriate, what is? The answer is simply to build your own - private - cloud. And for almost all situations, the loading is small enough to only require a single machine - a cloud of one.

A cloud of one is not simply having a single server under your own control. It should exhibit as many of the desirable principles of the public cloud as possible: not least the ability to configure and manage it from afar, and with the minimum of technical knowledge.

'Cloud of One' is one of four fundamental principles informing the thinking at Enstar, where these ideas are put into practice. Learn more.

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