2. Most existing applications won't benefit from being placed into a cloud computing environment. Most production applications are written with static topology and manual administration assumed, so they can't take advantage of self-service and automated elasticity. Therefore, inserting a cloud computing infrastructure into the production environment is going to provide little improvement for these applications. In any case, the leisurely march of virtualization into production environments should call into question the belief that IT organizations are going to, overnight, disperse cloud computing capabilities throughout their production infrastructure.

3. Cloud computing is expensive and disruptive to IT organizations. We constantly see organizations that underestimate the cost and change of moving to cloud computing. Just the fact that a new term -- devops -- needed to be created to describe how IT has to operate in a cloud environment should provide a clue about this.

So, to summarize: putting cloud computing into an existing production environment is disruptive and expensive, and doesn't provide many benefits. This should explain our assumption that most IT organizations will not retrofit cloud computing into their production computing environments.

Given this, many IT organizations are directing their initial private cloud initiatives at serving developers, which makes a lot of sense. Developers are typically underserved by existing processes, and offering them a self-service option helps productivity and, crucially, avoids many issues associated with production private clouds, like how to integrate existing heavyweight processes like ITIL with agile self-service resource assignment. Moreover, developers are pretty expensive employees, and avoiding long waits for resources reduces costs.

The question is, if an organization's initial foray into a private cloud is aimed at developers, what are the subsequent use scenarios? In other words, once developers begin using the private cloud for development (and, of course, testing) purposes, what happens? Here are common use scenarios and their implications: