Back in October, I blogged about a thought experiment: what if you could have an Amazon EC2 "appliance" behind your corporate firewall? Would it validate the concept/legitimacy of an "internal cloud" architecture?
Well, in an article by John Foley today, that might just be the case, except with Google's App Engine:
One technology company is working on a way to provide "a complete wrapper around App Engine," with the goal of recreating the App Engine environment outside of Google's data center, according to Google product manager Pete Koomen. "It would let you take an App Engine application and run it on your own servers if you needed to," he says. Koomen declined to name the company involved, but my sense is that it's just one of several options that will become available. The subject came up in a discussion of public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds that are a public-private combination.To me, this is helping establish the fact that whatever architecture the "big guys" are building in their hosted environments may well make its way into private data centers in the no-so-distant future.
The concept of how static internal infrastructure is managed today is changing... not doubt in my mind that compute resources are becoming more adaptive, agile, "elastic", etc., and that the economic advantages will follow.
Post-Script -
As I'm about to publish this, I also should highlight a bit of caution: Some would call Google's App Engine a proprietary cloud (PaaS) architecture. If such an App Engine "appliance" were really true, then this *could* be an attempt by Google to enhance adoption. Enterprises that were loathe to risk lock-in to Google's cloud, could instead run their App Engine jobs internally. You'd still be locked-into the App Engine architecture, but not into Google's infrastructure.
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