VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines

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There’s an ongoing debate about Amazon Web Services and its place in cloud computing. While much of the initial skepticism has died off — one rarely hears, “What does a bookseller find out about computing?” anymore (aside from from VWware executives) — Amazon still gets damned with faint praise.

We still hear: “You have to hand it to Amazon for having prepare an awesome offering. After all , for production applications, IT organizations require enterprise characteristics.” And: “AWS is an incredible resource that’s used lots for test and dev.” The clear implication is that only developers find AWS’s value proposition compelling, and when it comes time for serious computing, those applications shall be hosted internally or placed with an extra sort of hosting provider.

The relegation of AWS to the developer ghetto is in no way a given. The perception that AWS serves as a provider of cheap, unreliable computing power lags the market reality — many organizations run production applications in AWS, attracted by its easy accessibility and pay-as-you-go pricing.

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The adoption of AWS for production applications may additionally be a testament to the issue application groups are having as they try to move workloads out of the improvement process and into production. Motivating many application groups to circumvent the IT organization and deploy on AWS is the friction they encounter within IT: higher-priority needs, lengthy purchasing timeframes for capital needs and IT disinterest in supporting what it views as “unimportant” applications. There’s even a term for this scenario: Shadow IT.

The talk about how much and why companies use AWS for production applications misses a critical point, however. They’re increasingly using AWS to deploy applications designed and built for its characteristics.

So what’s AWS good for? Application groups are leveraging AWS’s unique characteristics to deploy applications unimaginable for classic IT infrastructures and processes. These applications run on hundreds or thousands of virtual machines, are linked to the addition and subtraction of huge amounts of server resources dynamically, and are predicated on opex instead of capex expenditures. This setup permits them to scale to much larger user populations, support freemium economic models and reply to highly erratic workloads — all unsupportable in traditional IT infrastructure settings.

Join me in Chicago on the second annual Cloud Connect, where we’ll tackle these and other questions inside the AWS & Eucalyptus track and half-day Amazon Web Services Boot Camp.

Cloud Connect, occurring Oct 21-23, 2013, offers three days of in-depth boot camps, panel discussions and access to a number of industry experts, all designed that will help you weigh your cloud options and transform what you are promoting. Register for Cloud Connect now.