Tech Field Day Podcast – Looking at Cloud in 2025
The public cloud is real; are are private clouds real? real? Will we see more private clouds in 2025? Private cloud technology is far from the early days when on-premises virtualization was cloud-washed. In this Tech Field Day Podcast episode, Jon Myer, Allyson Klein and Justin Warren join Alastair Cooke to examine why businesses deploy private clouds. The cloud operating model makes the private cloud more relevant in 2025 than ever.
In the early days of the cloud, it was common to call on-premises IT a thing of the past and predict the end of owning your IT. In the same way that taxis, public transport and Uber have not eliminated private car ownership, the public cloud adds to rather than replacing on-premises IT. Businesses want the agility and simplicity of public cloud platforms in their on-premises platforms and look to advances in private cloud platforms to bring the same value, possibly at a lower cost.
The early private cloud was a virtualization platform with a self-service portal for VM provisioning, quite different from the high-value managed services offered on the public cloud. Over time, the private cloud has become more capable, particularly with Kubernetes as a de-facto standard for workload orchestration. The portability of container images, Kubernetes manifests and Helm charts enables rapid deployment, reusability and workload management. Vendor-managed Kubernetes distributions have eased the challenge of deploying and managing the underlying infrastructure, allowing the same application focus on-premises as in the public cloud. Private clouds are more than a wrapper around virtualization.
I’ve often said the cloud catchphrase, “Pay only for what you use,” can also be written as “Pay for everything you use.” Organizations that do not see significant benefits from public cloud platforms often want the predictable cost of owning their infrastructure. Cost is a typical driver for moving one application to the public cloud or retaining another on-premises — the elasticity of the public cloud benefits applications with significant load peaks and troughs. However, many enterprise applications cannot benefit from elasticity, making operating on the public cloud expensive. These applications may still benefit from the agility of cloud operations, which allows new features and fixes to be deployed rapidly.
One way to implement a private cloud is to deploy a public cloud provider’s on-premises product, whether AWS Outposts, Microsoft AzureStack or Google Anthos, to provide some of the same public cloud services. The combination of the public cloud and on-premises is a hybrid cloud. Using the same services on-premises allows the same operating model and removes some of the technology discontinuity of linking different technology stacks on-premises in a hybrid deployment.
Businesses are seeking options for running applications in the right place, whether a public cloud or an on-premises platform, depending on the application and business requirements. Private cloud platforms have become more feature-rich and better focused on enabling business agility and developer productivity. We expect to see plenty of private cloud innovation in 2025.
