The document discusses themes around public versus private academic clouds. It summarizes the author's experience using public clouds for research and education purposes at UC Berkeley. Some key benefits included lower costs compared to operating their own cluster, easier administration and provisioning, and the ability to run large-scale experiments. However, private clouds may be needed for certain types of "cloud provider" research or to address security and regulatory issues with sensitive data. The author argues that public and private clouds each have advantages and it is unlikely any single solution will be best for all situations. Metering costs accurately across shared resources is also challenging.

1. Above the Clouds: A View From Academia Armando Fox, UC Berkeley EDUSERV Symposium, 12 May 2011 Presentation slides licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Image: John Curley http://www.flickr.com/photos/jay_que/1834540/

16. Public & private clouds don’t see same benefits * Implies ability to meter, and incentive to release idle resources Benefit Public Private “ infinite” resources on-demand Yes No Instantaneous provisioning Yes Varies Better hardware Yes No Zero-commitment pay-as-you-go* Yes No Reduced costs from economy of scale Yes No Can do “cloud provider” research No Yes Can trust co-tenants No Yes Better utilization through virtualization Yes Yes Quickly & inexpensively move big data No Yes Address data-custody regulatory issues Varies Yes