An introduction to private cloud versus public cloud masquerading as private cloud can be found here: https://1drv.ms/w/s!Ashlm-Nw-wnWrF0qVoeSgL7Xnu1w 

Here are a few specific ways to differentiate and make the private cloud more appealing while not stealing any light from public cloud. These include

1)     Provide container resources in addition to virtual machines to explode the number of computing resource

2)     Provide services that are customized to frequent usages by private cloud customers. This includes not only making it easier to use some services but also provisioning those that many customers often use.

3)     Anticipate customer requests and suggest compute resources based on past history and measurements.

4)     Provide additional services that more customers are drawn to the services and not just to the cloud. Additionally, the customers won’t mind when the weight of the services is shifted between public and private cloud infrastructure as the costs dictate.

5)     Provide additional services that won’t be offered elsewhere. For example, data tiering, aging, archival, deduplication, file services, backup and restore, naming and labeling, accelerated networks etc. offer major differentiation that do not necessarily have to lean towards machine learning to make the private cloud smart.

6)     Offer major periodic maintenance and activities on behalf of the customer such as monitoring disk space and adding storage, checking for usages and making in place suggestions on the portal.

7)     Reduce the volume of service desk tickets aggressively with preemptive actions and minimizing them to only failures.  This is paying off debt so it may not translate to new services.

8)     Improving regional experiences not only with savvy resources but also improved networks for major regions

9)     Provide transparency, accounting and auditing so that users can always choose to get more information for self-help and troubleshooting. FAQs and documentations could be improved preferably with search field.

10)  Enable subscriptions to any or all alerts that can be setup by the customer on various activities. This gives the user informational emails with subjects that can be used to filter and treat at appropriate levels.

 #codingexercise

int GetMinSumWeightedNegatives(List<int>negatives, uint scalar)

{

if (negatives == null || negatives.Count == 0) return 0;
int inclusive = negatives[0];
int exclusive = 0;
for (int i = 1; i < negatives.Count; i++)
{
var min = Math.min(inclusive, exclusive);
inclusive  = exclusive + scalar × negatives[i];
exclusive = min;
}
return Math.min(inclusive, exclusive);

}

It may be interesting to note that scalar weight cannot be negative unless the count of included negatives is even.