Which IaaS provider makes the best cloud bargain?

Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Phil Wainewright.

For all the talk of computing as a utility, it seems that the motto ‘You get what you pay for’ applies as much to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as it does to any other commodity. The computing you get for Amazon’s low prices may not be as cost-effective as that of other providers, depending on what you’re using it for. That’s the message from a set of benchmark tests published last month by independent tester The Tolly Group, commissioned by IT and managed services provider Dimension Data.

As you’d expect from research it commissioned and promotes, Dimension Data’s cloud offering does well in the benchmarks. Let me disclose upfront too that Dimension Data’s cloud unit recently paid me for some speaking engagements; but the company arranged to brief me on these benchmarks through normal media/analyst channels. Some circumspection in interpreting the results is evidently advisable. Nevertheless, the factors that gave rise to the findings are worth digging into…

Finding the best fit

To my mind, the most important takeaway goes back to a memorable phrase favored by Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft: most organizations are “forklifting” existing applications into the cloud. If that’s what you’re doing — just porting existing enterprise applications to a cloud platform in order to get economies of operation from a properly virtualized, automated and elastic computing infrastructure — then Amazon Web Services may not be the best fit for you. As Keao Caindec, CMO of Dimension Data’s cloud business unit told me: “It’s very difficult to run certain enterprise applications that require vertical scale on a scale-out cloud.”…

Read more from the source @ http://diginomica.com/2013/08/14/iaas-provider-offers-cloud-bargain/