Post on 15-Jan-2015
description
Hybrid Clouds are not the future, better IaaS
pricing is
Andreas Gauger@gaugi
Introduction• Andreas Gauger
• 18 years in the hosting/cloud industry
• Founded and led the 1&1 hosting business from 1995 to 2008
• Started ProfitBricks in 2010 together with Achim Weiß who was CTO at 1&1 and responsible for all development and all datacenters
Two statements…
When I saw the first cloud computing
products I thought they would never be
a success
First cloud computing• Only pretty small instances
• performance fluctuation due to bad neighbor problems
• No that reliable
• Lot’s of things you could not do (no networking, load balancing etc.)
• 2 to 4 times more expensive than dedicated servers
But it was a success…
• Very low starting cost
• No investments
• No long term contract, no unused capacity
• Once the workload was adapted to the cloud it was easily scalable, no (wrong) pre planning of capacity was necessary any more
• No management of hardware, datacenter or connectivity any more
Today cloud is different
• Small to very big instances available
• Performance of modern clouds can be very high
• Reliability can be very good due to more redundancy
• Software defined datacenters offer all the possibilities of „real hardware“ data centers
But…
The cloud is still overpriced
It’s the elephant in the room
• Typical public cloud IaaS offerings have gross margins as high as 80% to 90%
• Cloud pricing is dominated by big players that set the standards nearly all the competitors use as orientation
• Sadly also most companies that offer services on top of IaaS do the same
Why do I tell you?• I should shut up and be happy about the
margins
• But I think the artificially high pricing has started to hinder the adoption of IaaS
• Hybrid clouds emerge, and one of the main reasons for this is - the too high price of IaaS
• Companies with large workloads pull them from IaaS providers out of cost reasons
Old technology is happy
• The too high pricing leaves the door open for old technology
• Hardware vendors tell their customers to use „hybrid clouds“ that are a combination of a „private cloud“ where they can sell the good old servers and storage systems and public cloud
• Dedicated server hosters do the same thing but there the „private cloud“ is rented not bought
Even IaaS providers go back in time
• Some IaaS providers have „indecent proposals“
• The more more we take away from the flexibility the cloud promised, the better pricing you will get
• „Sign a three year fixed contract on an instance. Pay a high setup fee and a fixed monthly fee (no matter if you use the instance) and you get a 66% discount“ (actual offer of Amazon)
And why is this bad?
• Cloud computing is a promise.
• It is a very elegant form of resource allocation and it takes away a lot of burdens from the user
• Hybrid clouds and „lock-in“ pricing schemes take away these advantages and even add an additional layer of complexity to the management (hybrid clouds)
So what should you do?
• Look out for the new and modern IaaS companies out there.
• They didn’t have the burden of older technology and existing revenue streams to protect
• They offer modern, high performant virtual datacenters at much more reasonable pricing than the big players
Another secret• If you want to know your cost of a certain
IaaS provider for you there is ONLY ONE WAY to find out:
• Run your actual workload on that provider. The real one. Then find out what bang you get for your buck.
• If you try to compare IaaS provider pricing on paper you have a high chance to be factors off.
Conclusion
• Don’t go hybrid cloud for cost reasons
• Just find and test cost efficient IaaS providers and live happy ever after