SPONSORED POST
This sponsored post is produced by SherWeb.
There’s no denying that cloud services, in particular Infrastructure-as-a-Service, has come of age. Its main gatekeepers are now playing a no-win game that limits the value you get from using their services. Businesses are getting smart to this game, but how did we end up here? More importantly, what’s next?
Feature-driven market
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure built their lead in the IaaS market (and PaaS market in the case of early Azure) by adopting the exact same strategy: by broadening their offers through new features. And it was a winning strategy. Every time they launched a new feature, they essentially created a new market and cornered the demand. As long as they could show acceptable reliability, they had little concern for additional metrics like price or performance. It’s hard to blame them since there was no one for them to compare unfavorably to, and they were making major investments to get these new services lit up.
But now that the big two are stepping on each other’s toes in a number of segments (virtual machines, storage, etc.), they are being forced to create the semblance of competition. However, their “war” in the last year has only made their firm embrace of the status quo that much clearer. Their original agility is being hindered by their need to recoup the massive initial investments they made in development, engineering, datacenters, and hardware.
They’re also shying away from changing their value proposition in any real way since they already have the most paying customers. What’s more, they probably feel protected by their feature set because it impedes duplication from newcomers.
Status quo straining at the seams
However, this emphasis on protecting current assets is creating some weakness in what we are now forced to call ‘legacy’ IaaS providers. Newcomers simply need to pick at the seams of this situation to unravel their stranglehold on the market. DigitalOcean did it with pricing. They identified a real gap between the prices that were being charged for underpowered cloud servers and the cost of setting up a highly-focused, single-purpose, low-redundancy, low-service IaaS product. They built on the same compromises that AWS and Azure were accepting as fact, but they completely shattered the price structure. After all, if you have no pressing need for speed or reliability, it’s hard to justify the price AWS is asking.
Current providers’ attempts at performance appear lackluster
Performance seems to be the next fraying seam. The demand is certainly there, as businesses now realize that per-resource performance has a tremendous impact on the value they get from their cloud provider. While this is also true from a simple cost perspective (more performance per-resource means less $$$ spent), performance also has an impact on cloud services’ architecture and management thanks to its ability to reduce complexity through good old brute force.
The appeal of performance is well demonstrated by the arrival of provider performance monitoring sites, such as CloudSpectator.com, CloudScreener.com or CloudHarmony. These sites demonstrate the market’s new-found appreciation of the value of performance when it comes to cloud servers.
The attention that has been given to speed and performance over the last year has triggered a certain reaction from the big names. AWS introduced compute optimized (C3) virtual server instances. Rackspace followed suit with its ‘Performance 1 and 2’ line of virtual servers. Azure has just introduced the ‘D’ line of all-SSD instances.
But — and this is a big but — all these initiatives by ‘legacy’ IaaS providers are being done with great care not to disrupt their current business. Insomuch as getting to the market early benefitted their success, it is now handicapping their effort to earnestly follow new market trends. A quick look at public benchmarks makes this point instantly clear.
UniBench System Score
Just as DigitalOcean played the “price” card to shake up the market, who will play the “performance” card by delivering a truly high level of performance at an attractive cost?
SherWeb.com appears to have stepped up with its newly released SherWeb Performance Cloud. It is a clean, functional rendition of a public cloud with a clear focus on performance. All the hallmarks of a public cloud are there: the full-featured control panel, the pay-as-you-go model, the tenant API, etc. But SherWeb has also made full use of its greenfield situation to build a cloud that’s driven by a single purpose: delivering performance that goes well beyond the bar that has been set by legacy IaaS providers.
Will this focus on performance allow SherWeb to carve out a large niche in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market? Time will tell. In the meantime, we can all be thankful for focused newcomers driving up expectations of IaaS providers!
Guillaume, a SherWeb Product Manager, specializes in cloud and IaaS technologies with more than 14 years of experiencen B2B/B2C platforms. Instrumental in commercializing SherWeb’s public and private cloud, Guillaume is currently introducing further IaaS developments to the market. For more information, contact gboisvert@sherweb.com.
Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.
Can Amazon and Microsoft be beat in IaaS?
No comments:
Post a Comment