In the past few weeks I’ve run across a number of people building public clouds that plan on using the highest end hardware possible. The fastest processors, IO, memory, SSD’s, infiniband, redundant everything, high end SAN hardware, etc. My reaction every time is… “why???”.
There seems to be a growing concern by some people just entering the public IaaS cloud business that they won’t be able to differentiate themselves on price or features with the AWS’s of the world. So rather than looking at other ways to get in to the cloud business beyond IaaS or trying to differentiate themselves in IaaS on something like support, SLA’s, transparency, proven and ‘auditable’ regulatory compliance, brand, relationships, value-add, etc they think the solution is faster/better hardware sold at much higher prices (or much lower margin).
What I think they don’t seem to get is that the reason most people are moving to public IaaS is because they don’t care about the hardware. Any developer worth their weight that’s building for the cloud is building to take advantage of the ability to scale to turn resources on and off as needed. Any developer building apps to run in a public cloud that’s relying on super high end hardware to get the job done is just plain doing it wrong.
Would it surprise you to learn that all of these companies came from offering high-end colo and managed services? Talk about blind ambition. Do you agree or disagree with me? Would love to hear it in the comments.
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Notice: This article was originally posted at http://www.CloudNod.com by Scott Sanchez and is his personal opinion. Copyright 2011 Scott Sanchez, All Rights Reserved.
I largely agree, and advocate this point inside the service provider I work for. That said, some compliance encumbered folks still benefit from having best practiced certified hardware configurations from traditional big IT vendors when auditors come around. I didn’t think much about this angle until I talked to some of those folks in recent months.
[...] Do you agree or disagree with me? Would love to hear it in the comments. [...]
Operational costs also impact customers. If you are using the cheapest gear out there, chances are you may have performance and reliability issues and you may have integration issues that lead to delays in provisioning and troubleshooting. Moving up the stack (pun intended) can also be about driving efficiency, not just hardware speeds and feeds.
[...] Do you agree or disagree with me? Would love to hear it in the comments. [...]