I’m growing more and more concerned about the preponderance of Frankencloud offerings that I see being foisted into the market place (no, my employer, Dell, is not guiltless).  Frankenclouds are “cloud solutions” that are created by using duct tape, twine, wishful marketing brochures, and at least 4 marginally cloud enabled products.

The official Frankencloud recipe goes like this:

• Take 1 product that includes server virtualization (substitutions to VMware at your own risk)
• Take 1 product that does storage virtualization (substitutions to SAN at your own risk)
• Take 1 product that does network virtualization (substitutions to VLANs at your own risk)
• Take 1 product that does IT orchestration (your guess is as good as any)
• Take 1 product that does IT monitoring
• Take 1 product that does Virtualization monitoring
• Recommended: an unlimited Pizza budget for your IT Ops team

Combine the ingredients at high voltage in a climate conditioned environment.  Stir in a seriously large amounts of consulting services, training, and Red Bull.  At the end of this process, you will have your very own Frankencloud!

Frankenclouds are notoriously difficult to maintain because each part has its own version life cycle.  More critically, they also lack a brain.

Unfortunately, there are few alternatives to the Frankencloud today.  I think that the alternatives will rewrite the rules that Ops uses to create clouds.  Here are the rules that I think help drive a wooden stake through the heart of the Frankencloud (yeah, I mixed monsters):

• not assume that server virtualization == cloud. 
• simple, simple and simpler than that
• focus on applications (need to write more about DevOps)
• start with networking, not computation
• assume that software containers are replaced, not upgraded

What do you think we can do to defeat Frankenclouds?