I have long believed that success in the public cloud is not just about meeting the NIST definition, it also requires developer enablement. The rampant success of AWS is not driven by EC2 compute instances; it is by delivering services that enable developers to build applications that satisfy business needs rapidly. I believe that this is why we have seen IaaS based public clouds fail, they don’t deliver services that developers want to consume. Is there a parallel in private cloud? It seems that Stratoscale believes that there is, they have pivoted from providing only an on-premises IaaS cloud to delivering familiar AWS services on-premises. To be clear, they do not offer all of the AWS services and don’t give every API for every service. They are awesome, but not miracle workers, more products, and more extensive API coverage will come over time. Nonetheless, the services that they offer are pretty amazing. There are clones of AWS networking and load balancing, database service, Hadoop-as-a-service, Object and file services, as well as a Kubernetes-as-a-service offering. All these services are delivered on-premises using a software-only HCI deployment; you can re-use existing physical servers or buy your choice of new servers.
Developing software for AWS services is undoubtedly a popular practice, but usually locks you into deployment onto the AWS public cloud. With Stratoscale you can use many of the same services but deploy to on-premises infrastructure by changing one URL in the deployment process. Developers could use AWS for the development phase and then deploy to production on-premises, or the other way around. Applications could also be built with a split between on-premises and public cloud services, using the same architectures in both locations. I think that the strongest enterprise use-case for Stratoscale is organizations that want the agility of public cloud development but have regulatory or compliance requirements to keep their applications and data on-premises. The other strong use-case is for smaller public cloud providers to offer their own AWS compatible services and service niche requirements.
This is a very cool product. I hope to see more from Stratosacale as they expand their product and educate customers about the possibility of AWS compatible services on-premises.
© 2017, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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