Choosing a Cloud Computing IaaS Provider
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As more and more companies begin to move towards cloud computing and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) it is good, I think, to look at the big and interesting players in the industry and see how and when they make sense, or don't make sense.
First, who are the key players in the space? At this time Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and IBM Softlayer are really the big boys with smaller, lower cost but very interesting players Digital Ocean and Vultr being worthy of consideration as well.
-- Full Stack Players --
Amazon EC2: The granddaddy of cloud computing and the creator of its monicker. No one is more enterprise, has more features, runs faster or scales bigger. This is the biggest of the big. They own everything that they do from top to bottom. EC2's biggest issues stem from a high learning curve and a design that simply assumes that you understand cloud computing and intend to run a complete DevOps model. There is no accommodation for casual users, new users or the SMB market and its needs for a VPS platform rather than a cloud one. Price is extreme good, but you pay a premium for the high end stability. Proprietary platform. Xen under the hood.
Rackspace: Also an old player and one of the biggest. Long history. Very new users, SMB and VPS friendly. Easy to get started. Easy to use. Easy to understand. Lots of hand holding, real people there to help you instantly. Not the cheapest, you pay for the added benefits and focus. Almost always the best choice for the SMB market. OpenStack platform (created by Rackspace!) *Xen under the hood.)
Microsoft Azure: One of the newer players, Azure is Microsoft's own cloud platform built on a variation of HyperV, but not HyperV. Notably lower performance than Amazon, but still good. Pricing is on the high side. Excellent range of features and often very favourable options for Microsoft products. Popular for SMBs, but falls between Amazon and Rackspace in ease of use. Proprietary platform. Azure under the hood.
IBM's Softlayer: IBM bought cloud provider Softlayer some years ago to get into the game. Softlayer is large and has a wide range of products. They fall into a weird spot where the product is good but fails to have a compelling reason to chose it over one of the other three players. They are big and high quality but have become the "me too" fourth player of the enterprise cloud computing space. OpenStack platform. Xen under the hood.
-- VPS Style Players --
Digital Ocean: Seemingly the leader in the low cost cloud computing space, Digital Ocean has great performance, super easy interfaces for SMBs and VPS style users including console access, a huge feature missing from the more cloud focused enterprise players listed above. Digital Ocean lacks the capability of running Windows workloads. KVM under the hood.
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Of the ones that I have tested (which is all but Vultr) it is Rackspace and Digital Ocean that make the most sense for the SMB market where DevOps models are uncommon and unnecessary. These players encourage traditional "snowflake" administration practices.
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Update: Originally had another vendor on this list as an "untested, but have heard good things." We did test and immediately found them to be unstable and not appropriate for this list. So the list has been appended.
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Full stack players I define as those that are equipped to handle an entire infrastructure with dedicated firewalls, load balancers, VPN connections and similar. They use a cloud to build an entire infrastructure like you would traditionally. These are the ones meant to be used "as a cloud" with full scale, production, enterprise applications being run there.
VPS players use a cloud architecture (in this list) to provide "Virtual Private Servers." They are basically providing a legacy service but use a modern infrastructure to do it. They offer nothing but servers and leave it to you to build out any infrastructure that you need, which generally means that most features are simply unavailable.
For the SMB market, most are only looking for VPS and are not even aware of how a cloud is meant to be used, so a VPS provider may be ideal. This is not a negative. In the same way that they do not offer a full stack, they do offer a console. None of the full stack players offer that any longer.
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Rackspace has a $50/Month Minimum.
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@Aaron-Studer said:
Rackspace has a $50/Month Minimum.
That's for managed services, doesn't apply to IaaS. If you don't want them to manage stuff for you and just want IaaS, there is no minimum.
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@scottalanmiller I went around and around with them yesterday, and they said $50/month was the minimum for all packages.... Maybe the person on chat was confused.
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@Aaron-Studer said:
@scottalanmiller I went around and around with them yesterday, and they said $50/month was the minimum for all packages.... Maybe the person on chat was confused.
I've had that before, Switch to emails, put it in writing, then they'll relent. Rackspace are terrible for hard-upsells.
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@Aaron-Studer said:
@scottalanmiller I went around and around with them yesterday, and they said $50/month was the minimum for all packages.... Maybe the person on chat was confused.
Very strange. Did you try just buying the IaaS by the hour package, rather than talking to someone?
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Wow. Ive never paid that much. Granted I know a lot of people at rack space. It's like 20min from me to there datacenter and office here.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Wow. Ive never paid that much. Granted I know a lot of people at rack space. It's like 20min from me to there datacenter and office here.
I've definitely gotten stuff below that price. I'm going to reach out to RS managers and see what the deal is. It's possible that a new minimum has been introduced, but that makes no sense at all.
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Is this the wrong signup page?
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That's the managed infrastructure, you want unmanaged infrastructure. Contact them directly.
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@Breffni-Potter I told them I wanted unmanaged, and they said this is the best they could do
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@Aaron-Studer for a company or for yourself. Maybe they just don't like doing unmanaged for individuals.
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@Aaron-Studer said:
@Breffni-Potter I told them I wanted unmanaged, and they said this is the best they could do
Was that over live-chat? Have you tried phone/email methods? Sounds very dodgy.
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@thecreativeone91 For myself.
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I went through some different links and @Aaron-Studer might be right, they might have abandoned the old model. Looks like they might be exiting the serious IaaS game, which is sad. Might be time to narrow the field to just Amazon and Azure. Rackspace's value has been dwindling for some time. Their value has been mostly around ease of use. So their niche was going away.
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Rackspace is getting squeezed between Amazon for full stack features and Digital Ocean for low cost ones and VPS. RS' spot in the middle with their super poorly paid technical staff and struggles to maintain late night (US) support is probably make them panic.
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They pay near min wage here. Sys Admins/Linux Admin/Network admins are like $10/hr or so.
