Public/private cloud - pure reality without marketing bla...bla...bla

We all know the datacenter cloud concept - consuming datacenter resources in standard and predictable way - is inevitable. However technology is not 100% ready to satisfy all cloud requirements. At least not efficiently and painlessly. I feel the same opinion from other professionals. I really like following statement mentioned at Scott Lowe interview with Jesse Proudman ...

Our customers and prospects are all evolving their cloud strategies in real time, and are looking for solutions that satisfy these requirements:

1. Ease of use ­ new solutions should be intuitively simple. Engineers should be able to use existing tooling, and ops staff shouldn't have to go learn an entirely new operational environment.
2. Deliver IaaS and PaaS - IaaS has become a ubiquitous requirement, but we repeatedly heard requests for an environment that would also support PaaS deployments.
3. Elastic capabilities - the desire to the ability to grow and contract private environments much in the same way they could in a public cloud.
4. Integration with existing IT infrastructure ­ businesses have significant investments in existing data center infrastructure: load balancers, IDS/IPS, SAN, database infrastructure, etc. From our conversations, integration of those devices into a hosted cloud environment brought significant value to their cloud strategy.
5. Security policy control ­ greater compliance pressures mean a physical "air gap" around their cloud infrastructure can help ensure compliance and ease peace of mind.
6. Cost predictability and control - Customers didn't want to need a PhD to understand how much they'll owe at the end of the month. Budgets are projected a year in advance, and they needed to know they could project their budgeted dollars into specific capacity.

This is very nicely summarized customer's cloud requirements.