Cirrus clouds (License CC Attribution-Share Alike)
With the commoditization of cloud infrastructure I just couldn’t resist playing with the thought of a cooperative cloud.
Lets say that you or your company has a need of a flexible IT department. The same goes for many of the peers in your network.
Instead of everyone of you hosting your applications at Rackspace, Amazon or your local supplier, you team up with your peers and rent a rack and a Gb-link onto the Internet at the “best” local colocation supplier. Lease or rent the hardware to fill up the rack with cost effective hardware. Onto that hardware you then deploy something like OpenStack to most effectively use the said hardware.
To solve the economics use the systems built in functionality to record the usage, split the monthly cost between the parties involved according to their share of the usage. If the system is not used fully invite more peers or sell hosting to others. If running out of resources, rent more hardware.
The two main problems as i see it is, security and physical administration. Who should be allowed to access the controls of the cloud and how do you guarantee that information doesn’t somehow seep from one party to another. Clearly there has to be some adaptations be made to the administrative interface. But the biggest problem most likely is when the system needs manual assistance, breaks down or need repair for some reason.
Feasible or just plain stupid?