Brokering the Cloud
Virtualization Review editor-in-chief Bruce Hoard introduced me to a concept I had never heard of before -- cloud brokers.
I kinda thought that IT would choose one cloud provider (or at least one per app) and stick with it. This is due to the fact that IT needs a provider that can support particular demands.
But in some cases, the cloud is just a commodity, so one might want to switch providers based on price, performance or perks. That's where cloud brokers come in. These aren't like suit wearing, martini drinking Wall Street stockbrokers. No, cloud brokers are either an appliance or a service that can swap between cloud providers or manage multiple providers, allowing processing to be moved from cloud to cloud much like we now do with virtual machines. So in a sense, you as the customer decide when to switch or how to share workloads across providers. The software or service does the rest.
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/18/2011 at 12:47 PM