The future of cloud computing is hybrid, according to Rackspace. However, the hosting firm also warned businesses to choose the right deployment model to suit their applications, and extolled the virtues of open standards in helping to build the best solution.

At a Rackspace “Unlocked” event in London, part of the firm’s Rackspace Academy programme, chief technology officer Nigel Beighton told an audience of engineers how to take best advantage of cloud computing, and hybrid cloud in particular.

“The next cloud is the hybrid cloud, it is the right fit for the enterprise,” Beighton said, echoing the industry consensus that, for the near future at least, firms are unlikely to ditch on-premise infrastructure for cloud services, but will instead use cloud to supplement and extend what they already have.

Beighton warned against rushing to the public cloud, and said that organisations need to consider which location will be the best place for applications and services to be delivered from on a case-by-case basis.

“People always talk up the pay-as-you-go aspect of public cloud services, but here’s an analogy. You can rent a car if you need one to use one, but if you rented a car every day you would find it more expensive than owning one in the long run,” he said.

Security is also “much harder” when running services on public cloud infrastructure, according to Beighton. “It isn’t necessarily less secure, it’s just more difficult to do,” he warned.

The real benefits of using cloud are that you can separate IT infrastructure from where it actually runs to give you greater flexibility, and that cloud frees developers in particular by allowing them access to extra resources when they need them, instead of going through a lengthy traditional procurement process.

“Cloud allows developers to grab more resources quickly, and this is leading to real fundamental change in the way development works, leading to firms being able to deliver apps faster. No longer is infrastructure the blocker. If you want to get new functions out there, you can change your app on the fly,” Beighton said.

Rackspace cloud architect Wayne Walls also highlighted one customer case study as a cautionary tale about choosing the right cloud approach.

HubSpot is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm offering marketing tools, but it found that as it increased its customer base, an increasing fraction of its server instances running on public cloud infrastructure were failing.

“The problem with public cloud is that while you might be saving money, you’re not getting rock-solid infrastructure like you can if you build it yourself, so you’re going to have to work around that and build resiliency into your software,” Walls said.

However, HubSpot found itself constrained by the API set offered by its cloud provider, and instead turned to OpenStack, the platform co-founded by Rackspace.

Because OpenStack has an open API and is an open source project in the hands of a developer community, Hubspot was able to request the features it needed and see them implemented, according to Walls.

Walls also warned that many firms looking to use public cloud infrastructure are often tempted purely by the potential capital expenditure savings on hardware and technical support, and do not see the pitfalls.

“Moving to cloud is not just a forklift job where you take an application and drop it into the cloud and suddenly you get all the advantages. Cloud is a new platform that you must design for,” he said.

“However, many cloud users have done exactly this. They looked at public cloud pricing and said, ‘Wow, I don’t need to pay the VMware tax anymore,’ then got bitten. Running clouds is not easy – people still want that escalation point, where you need to call someone to fix things, which is why support will always matter, even with cloud,” he added.