Mainstream IaaS replacement customer case review

While the infrastructure as a service is mentioned, it people have a lot of options in addition to Amazon and Rackspace, but they are often forgotten. With two companies already operating in Amazon and Rackspace, and then turning to smaller, iaas providers who are less focused, they say the shift gives them more flexibility and better customer support.

From Amazon to Profitbricks: better support for better interfaces

Real Estate Financial services company Neighborhood Pay service has used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host infrastructure since its inception in 2008. The company is still using Amazon for Bain, but five months ago they moved their production applications to a newer company, the Profitbricks GmbH.

"We don't like the Amazon system interface, and customer service is not profitbricks," said Richard Calmas, CEO of neighborhood Pay services.

The problems with the AWS interface and customer service are clearly understandable, and this process is problematic when a contractor hired by neighborhood Pay Services migrates to profitbricks. "You can't get Amazon's phone support if you don't pay, at least 100 dollars one months," said Eric Raunig, neighborhood Pay Services BAE Administrator, "and their UI is too complex." ”

Profitbricks provides a finer-grained service than Amazon. Although Amazon has preset miniature, small, medium, large, and very large instances available, Profitbricks allows users to expand CPU, RAM, hard disk space, and network bandwidth separately for each instance at run time, Raunig says it will be useful sooner or later when performing SQL database analysis.

Although the Profitbricks product has so far been satisfactory, neighborhood Pay services is not ready to stop being an Amazon customer. "When we are in and our customers say that we use Amazon services, they are very relieved because just everyone knows the brand," Calmas introduced. Amazon is often considered a market leader in cloud computing services, with tens of thousands of customers, and profitbricks so far only about 1000.

Ogmento found Cloudsigma more suitable for himself

Ogmento, a Native American gaming company, started running on AWS and then moved on to Rackspace, where it released its latest game with the infrastructure, called Cloudsigma, as a service. Ogmento released its first game, Ghost Video (Paranormal Activity): 2010 on AWS, but Amazon's smallest example was still too big for the company's highly distributed workloads.

"Many of our examples we are talking about are about 512M ram,1g hard drives and very little CPUs," Terrance Cohen, who is the vice president of Ogmento gaming platform. The demand was in line with Amazon's miniature example, which was released in September 2012, but Cohen said the company had a bad experience in the early stages of the product, with their 2011-year nba:king of the Earl game turning to Rackspace.

Rackspace does not fix the Ogmento performance problem. The performance problems and network latency caused by the shared infrastructure lead to MySQL cluster downtime, sometimes once a day, sometimes once a week. Although Rackspace's support engineers are very responsible, they cannot actually solve the problem. "The experience on the Rackspace is not good," Cohen said.

Cohen said he was also advised to avoid the problem in Rackspace's private cloud, but the cost was not satisfactory.

Finally, in 2012 years, a Ogmento platform engineer met Cloudsigma at a trade show. Cloudsigma runs high-performance infrastructure, 10G Ethernet, solid-state drives, and provides a minimum of 1 MHz of CPUs, 1MB hard drives, 1MB disk space, and 1MB network data transfer every five minutes.

"In fact, we can separate out the amount of RAM, the CPU, and the amount of drive space we want for each instance, which is all too satisfying," Cohen says. "Ogmento is ready to publish the nba:king of the Earl 2 on Cloudsigma's infrastructure." The generation still runs on the Rackspace.

The Cloudsigma service is not currently without problems, and a few weeks ago the damaged hard disk problem caused some writable files to become read-only, but the support work was adjusted quickly. At the same time, "The cost is also more annoying," he says, Cloudsigma's system has a problem with subscriptions and on-demand base costs.

Ogmento's experience is not typical, Rackspace CTO John engates in an interview with TechTarget. "We value service very much," he said. Rackspace has more than 190,000 customers in 120 countries and has a low rate of customer churn, the company's official introduction wrote, which won 38,000 customers last year.

IaaS specialization becomes a trend

Analysts say the services provided by Profitbricks and Cloudsigma are pioneers of a new generation of IAAS providers, focusing on building finer-grained services. However, fine-grained services may not be a differentiator, and instead, expect to see newer IaaS vendors focusing on the vertical industry, James Staten said he was an analyst at Forrester.

"Cloudsigma may succeed in their finely differentiated efforts, in part because they focus on high-performance infrastructure and are also subject to customer orders from the media and entertainment sectors because they want high-definition traffic," he said.