Rational Survivability

Some suggest in discussing the role and long-term sustainable value of infrastructure versus software in cloud that software will marginalize bespoke infrastructure and the latter will simply commoditize.

I find that an interesting assertion, given that it tends to ignore the realities that both hardware and software ultimately suffer from a case of Moore’s Law — from speeds and feeds to the multi-core crisis, this will continue ad infinitum.  It’s important to keep that perspective.

In discussing this, proponents of software domination almost exclusively highlight Amazon Web Services as their lighthouse illustration.  For the purpose of simplicity, let’s focus on compute infrastructure.

Here’s why pointing to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as representative of all cloud offerings in general to anchor the hardware versus software value debate is not a reasonable assertion:

1. AWS delivers a well-defined set of services designed to be deployed without modification across a massive number of customers; leveraging a common set of standardized capabilities across these customers differentiates the service and enables low cost
2. AWS enjoys general non-variability in workload from *their* perspective since they offer fixed increments of compute and memory allocation per unit measure of exposed abstracted and virtualized infrastructure resources, so there’s a ceiling on what workloads per unit measure can do. It’s predictable.
3. From AWS’ perspective (the lens of the provider) regardless of the “custom stuff” running within these fixed-sized containers, the main focus of their core “cloud” infrastructure actually functions like a grid — performing what amounts to a few tasks on a finely-tuned platform to deliver such
4. This yields the ability for homogeneity in infrastructure and a focus on standardized and globalized power efficient, low cost, and easy-to-replicate components since the problem of expansion beyond a single unit measure of maximal workload capacity is simply a function of scaling out to more of them (or stepping up to one of the next few rungs on the scale-up ladder)

Yup, I just said that AWS is actually a grid whose derivative output is a set of cloud services.

Why does this matter?  Because not all IaaS cloud providers are architected to achieve this — by design — and this has dramatic impact on where hardware and software, leveraged independently or as a total solution, play in the debate.

This is because AWS built and own the entire “CloudOS” stack from customized hardware through to the VMM, management and security planes (much as Google does the same) versus other providers who use what amounts to more generic software offerings from the likes of VMware and lean on API’s and an ecosystem to extend it’s capabilities as well as big iron to power it.  This will yield more customizable offerings that likely won’t scale as highly as AWS.

That’s because they’re not “grids” and were never designed to be.

Many other IaaS providers that have evolved from hosting are building their next-generation offerings from unified fabric and unified computing platforms (so-called “big iron”) which are the furtherest thing from “commodity” hardware you can get.  Further, SaaS and PaaS providers generally tend to do the same based on design goals and business models.  Remember, IaaS is not representative of all things cloud — it’s only one of the service models.

Comparing AWS to most other IaaS cloud providers is a false argument upon which to anchor the hardware versus software debate.

/Hoff