How is cloud computing like pork bellies?
One of the most common questions I get from potential customers is, "tell me why your service is better than Amazon's"
And the truthful answer is - as with any product you're evaluating - "that depends on what is important to you." For some customers, Amazon is truly a better fit than ENKI.
However, what I've noticed is that the customers who ask this question most often are shopping on price. For them, better = cheaper. As a buyer of services myself, I care more about value than price. After all something I don't want that is on sale is hardly a good value. What is value? It's benefit divided by price. Benefit, of course, depends on how suitable the product is to meet the need you have for it. So when I see a customer shopping on price alone, I wonder how much they know about Cloud Computing and how it can benefit their business. There's clearly an opportunity for an interesting discussion and potential sale there. Now, it is a daunting task to know exactly what Cloud Computing is. Everyone seems to have different definition, and ultimately most people seem to think it means "something that lets me save money on servers while getting my business done." However, there is a lot more to it than that, and it will be a theme of upcoming blog articles.
Shopping on price alone assumes that Cloud Computing is a commodity, like water, electricity, or even pork bellies. With a commodity, price is the only factor to compare on. Even for water and electricity this isn't exactly true: they can have variables like purity or uptime that affect their value. There is an ever increasing number of cloud companies out there - including many who "cloud wash" existing hosting or SaaS products to take advantage of the hype and justifiable enthusiasm about Cloud Computing. Each of these companies - including ENKI - offers services that are different from Amazon. So, to pick out the cloud vendor that will give you the best value, you have to look at how well their product meets your needs as well as the price they charge. Amazon is justifiably the first vendor in the Cloud space, and their focus on price and easy access for programmers has made them a vendor of what I call the "price-based cloud." ENKI and some of the more recent cloud vendors are focusing on providing value, which is where I think Cloud Computing will be going in the future, to meet the needs of the enterprise and 24x7 business. This is what i call the "value-based cloud."
Some areas where cloud vendors differ include:
- Performance. The limitations of commodity-based hardware used in many clouds result in performance bottlenecks. Many cloud vendors are installing enterprise-grade networking and storage to allow their customers to achieve the kind of results that enterprises are used to in dedicated data centers - but this of course comes at increased price over the least expensive services. I often get new customers with horror stories of 200-millisecond latencies to storage, slow networking, or databases that don't speed up no matter how many cores of CPU are allocated to them, but for many the performance of price-based clouds is completely adequate. It really depends on your application.
- Compatibility. Many pundits have said that the success or failure of Cloud Computing hinges on how easy it will be to move legacy applications into the Cloud. Cloud vendors that offer an analogue to existing data center architectures (a "Virtual Private Data Center" or VPDC) are aimed at making the transition to the Cloud as easy as possible.
- Uptime. The history of price-based clouds has been ripe with downtime, though it is getting better. Many vendors offer only vague SLAs or require extensive effort on their customers' part to receive SLA guarantees. Value base cloud vendors focus more on SLAs and uptime because their customers demand it for their businesses.
- High Availability. Price-based cloud vendors generally leave high availability up to their customers. However, an increasing number of value-based cloud vendors offer automatic failover, easy disaster recovery, and even geographical diversity, without much if any application changes.
- Security. Price-based cloud vendors offer individual instances, each exposed to the internet. This makes sense, since it requires much less human attention than a virtual private datacenter. However, it's not secure, and you have to spend some of each instance's processing power on any software firewall you may install. Many value-based cloud vendors offer additional security, including hardware firewalls and VPDCs, as well as special purpose data storage that encrypts the data and stores it locally so that it can't be intercepted on its way between your application and the storage.
- Administration automation, or policy-based management: With price-based clouds, typically you are responsibile for administering your instances and your "data center" of collaborating instances. Value-based cloud vendors are increasingly introducing policy-based management, such as automatic scaling of your data center on load increases, or display of "site down" pages when you take your site down, or even active-active site management for near zero downtime.
- Services. Many of my customers couldn't make the price-based cloud work for themselves without hiring additional staff to adapt their software to the cloud as well as manage their deployment in the cloud, negating any cost savings. Value-based cloud vendors offer a range of management services, from simple support to fully outsourced cloud deployment and system administration (what I call Operations Services.)
- Relationship and Trust. If you deploy your businesses money-making processes to the Cloud, your cloud vendor is your business partner, and you need to trust them. However, relationships are expensive, so price-based cloud vendors will typically not give you access to policy makers or have personal representatives to make sure they're serving your needs. However, the businesses that have been serving the Enterprise's IT needs in the past - generally large consulting companies or hardware vendor professional services arms - know that personal contact is how they keep their customers happy and productive. Look to see value-based cloud vendors moving into this space, or partnering with existing relationship-oriented services firms.
The differences between my view of price and value-based clouds is summarized in the chart below (click to enlarge):
As you can see, Cloud Computing really isn't a lot like pork bellies! Within the space of these variables (and more), cloud vendors can create a large variety of offerings to meet your needs. And the cost savings that you'd like to achieve from your move to the Cloud depends on more than hourly CPU cost, but also what it costs you if your site is down, or labor costs for "cloud experts" that you have to hire to manage your deployment. What I've seen with our sales process is that our consultative approach means that we can find the right set of services to make our customers successful and provide the best value to them. In the process, we're learning from our customers what it takes to bring them value. I'll keep sharing that with you in upcoming blogs.
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