What Would the Best Franken-Cloud Look Like?

What if you could take all infrastructure cloud providers and combine their best assets into a single, perfect cloud? What would it look like?

In my day job, I regularly see the sorts of things that cloud users ask for from a public cloud. These 9 things represent some of the most common requests:

1. Scale. Can the platform give me virtually infinite capacity anywhere in the world?
2. Low price. Is the cost of compute/storage low?
3. Innovative internal platform. Does the underlying platform reflect next-generation thinking that will be relevant in years to come?
4. On-premises parity. Can I use on-premises tools and technologies alongside this cloud platform?
5. Strong ecosystem. Is it possible to fill in gaps or enrich the platform through the use of 3rd party products or services? Is there a solid API that partners can work with?
6. Application services. Are there services I can use to compose applications faster and reduce ongoing maintenance cost?
7. Management experience. Does the platform have good “day 2” management capabilities that let me function at scale with a large footprint?
8. Available support. How can I get help setting up and running my cloud?
9. Simplicity. Is there an easy on-ramp and can I quickly get tasks done?

Which cloud providers offer the BEST option for each capability? We could argue until we’re blue in the face, but we’re just having fun here. In many cases, the gap between the “best” and “second best” is tiny and I could make the case that a few different clouds do every single item above pretty well. But that’s no fun, so here’s what components of each vendor that I’d combine into the “perfect” cloud.

DISCLAIMER: I’m the product owner for the CenturyLink Cloud. Obviously my perspective is colored by that. However, I’ve taught three well-received courses on AWS, use Microsoft Azure often as part of my Microsoft MVP status, and spend my day studying the cloud market and playing with cloud technology. While I’m not unbiased, I’m also realistic and can recognize strengths and weaknesses of many vendors in the space.

Google Compute Engine – BEST: Innovative Platform

Difficult to judge without insider knowledge of everyone’s cloud guts, but I’ll throw this one to Google. Every cloud provider has solved some tricky distributed systems problems, but Google’s forward-thinking work with containers has made it possible for them to do things at massive scale. While their current Windows Server support is pretty lame – and that could impact whether this is really a legit “use-for-everything cloud” for large companies – I believe they’ll keep applying their unique knowledge to the cloud platform.

Microsoft Azure – BEST: On-premises Parity, Application Services

It’s unrealistic to ask any established company to throw away all their investments in on-premises technology and tools, so clouds that ease the transition have a leg up. Microsoft offers a handful of cloud services with on-premises parallels (Active Directory, SQL Server, SharePoint Online, VMs based on Hyper-V) that make the transition simpler. There’s management through System Center, and a good set of hybrid networking options. They still have a lot of cloud-only products or cloud-only constraints, but they do a solid job of creating a unified story.

It’s difficult to say who has a “better” set of application services, AWS or Microsoft. AWS has a very powerful catalog of services for data storage, application streaming, queuing, and mobile development. I’ll give a slight edge to Microsoft for a better set of application integration services, web app hosting services, and identity services.

Most of these are modular microservices that can be mashed up with applications running in any other cloud. That’s welcome news to those who prefer other clouds for primary workloads, but can benefit from the point services offered by companies like Microsoft.

CenturyLink Cloud – BEST: Management Experience

Many cloud providers focus on the “acquire stuff” experience and leave the “manage stuff” experience lacking. Whether your cloud resources live for 3 days or three years, there are maintenance activities. CenturyLink Cloud lets you create account hierarchies to represent your org, organize virtual servers into “groups”, act on those servers as a group, see cross-DC server health at a glance, and more. It’s a focus of this platform, and it differs from most other clouds that give you a flat list of cloud servers per data center and a limited number of UI-driven management tools. With the rise of configuration management as a mainstream toolset, platforms with limited UIs can still offer robust means for managing servers at scale. But, CenturyLink Cloud is focused on everything from account management and price transparency, to bulk server management in the platform.

 

Rackspace – BEST: Support

Rackspace has recently pivoted from offering a do-it-yourself IaaS and now offers cloud with managed services. “Fanantical Support” has been Rackspace’s mantra for years – and by all accounts, one they’ve lived up to – and now they are committing fully to a white-glove, managed cloud. In addition, they offer DevOps consultative services, DBA services, general professional services, and more. They’ve also got solid support documentation and support forums for those who are trying to do some things on their own. Many (most?) other clouds do a nice job of offering up self-service or consultative support, but Rackspace makes it a core focus.

Amazon Web Services – BEST: Scale, Ecosystem

Yes, AWS does a lot of things very well. If you’re looking for a lot of web-scale capacity anywhere in the world, AWS is tough to beat. They clearly have lots of capacity, and run more cloud workloads that pretty much everyone else combined. Each cloud provider seems to be expanding rapidly, but if you are identifying who has scaled the most, you have to say AWS.

On “ecosystem” you could ague that Microsoft has a strong story, but realistically, Amazon’s got everyone beat. Any decent cloud-enabled tool knows how to talk to the AWS API, there are entire OSS toolsets built around the platform, and they have a marketplace stuffed with virtual appliances and compatible products. Not to mention, there are lots of AWS developers out there writing about the services, attending meetups, and building tools to help other developers out.

Digital Ocean – BEST: Low Price, Simplicity

Digital Ocean has really become a darling of developers. Why? Even with the infrastructure price wars going on among the large cloud providers, Digital Ocean has a really easy-to-understand, low price. Whether kicking the tires or deploying massive apps, Digital Ocean gives you a very price-competitive Linux-hosting service. Now, the “total cost of cloud” is a heck of a lot more than compute and storage costs, but, those are factors that resonates with people the most when first assessing clouds.

For “simplicity”, you could argue for a lot of different providers here. Digital Ocean doesn’t offer a lots of knobs to turn, or organize their platform in a way that maps to most enterprise IT org structures, but you can’t argue with the straightforward user experience. You can go from “Hmm, I wonder what this is?” to “I’m up and running!” in about 60 seconds. That’s … a frictionless experience.

Summary

If you did this exercise on your own, you could easily expand the list of capabilities (e.g. ancillary services, performance, configuration options, security compliance), and swap around some of the providers. I didn’t even list out other nice cloud vendors like IBM/SoftLayer, Linode, and Joyent. You could probably slot them into some of the “winner” positions based on your own perspective.

In reality, there is no “perfect” cloud (yet). There are always tradeoffs associated with each service and some capabilities that matter to you more than others. This thought experiment helped me think through the market, and hopefully gave you a something to consider!