Cloud Computing Showdown: Amazon vs. Rackspace (OpenStack) v
Source: Brandon Butler
We seem to have entered an age of computing that I didn't see coming: the age of the terrible user interface. Windows 8 is leading the charge with not one, but two awful interfaces. That's what I think, and so does the lord of all interface analysts, Jakob Nielsen. He said Windows 8 is "weak on tablets, terrible for PCs."
But it's not just Microsoft. GNOME, once the leading Linux desktop, is rapidly fading into the background because of bad design choices in GNOME 3.x. What's going on?
I think the problem is that far too many people have forgotten UI 101 -- make it easy -- despite the availability of the handy acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid).
Since back when Microsoft was still calling its brand-new interface Metro, I saw Windows 8 as a disaster in the making. My biggest complaint was with the cartoonish and annoying tiles. Made for touchscreens, they're fairly usable when you're holding a small device at, say, a 45-degree angle. But when the touchscreen is a monitor sitting on a desktop at something closer to 90 degrees? That results in a phenomenon called gorilla arm, a situation blamed for the failure of touchscreens on the desktop as long ago as the 1980s.
Too bad Microsoft hasn't paid attention.
Nielsen notes an even bigger problem -- one I should have seen myself. "Two environments on a single device is a prescription for usability problems," he writes. Of course it is. It's bad enough that Microsoft wants Windows users to forget everything they ever learned about using the XP and Windows 7 interfaces, but it now wants them to learn two separate interfaces to do the same old things they used to do with one.
At least I understand why Microsoft went wrong. It had this idea of uniting the experience of using smartphones, tablets and PCs. That is clearly what the UI formerly known as Metro was meant to do. True, Microsoft backtracked on that one-interface idea, deciding to include something closer to Windows 7 as an alternative for the desktop. That second-guessing didn't make Windows 8 any better, though, just clunkier.
But why has GNOME fallen off the path of UI sanity? I don't know. One observer wrote about GNOME's mistakes: "I used to be upset when gnome developers decided it was 'too complicated' for the user to remap some mouse buttons. In gnome3, the developers have apparently decided that it's 'too complicated' to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do."
It wouldn't be a mischaracterization to equate the cloud computing industry to the wild, wild west.
Read Network World's other tech arguments.
There is such a variety of vendors gunning at one another and the industry is young enough that true winners and losers have not yet been determined. Amazon has established itself as the early market leader, but big-name legacy IT companies are competing hard, especially on the enterprise side, and a budding crop of startups are looking to stake their claims, too.
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In its latest Magic Quadrant report, research firm Gartner lists 14 infrastructure as a service (IaaS) companies, but Network World looked at four of the biggest names to compare and contrast: Amazon Web Services, Rackspace (and OpenStack), Microsoft and Google.
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Amazon Web Services
It's hard to find someone who doesn't agree that Amazon Web Services is the market leader in IaaS cloud computing. The company has one of the widest breadths of cloud services - including compute, storage, networking, databases, load balancers, applications and application development platforms all delivered as a cloud service. Amazon has dropped its prices 21 times since it debuted its cloud six years ago and fairly consistently fills whatever gaps it has in the size of virtual machine instances on its platform - the company recently rolled out new high-memory instances, for example.
There are some cautions for Amazon though. Namely, its cloud has experienced three major outages in two years. One analyst, Jillian Mirandi of Technology Business Researcher, has suggested that continued outages could eventually start hindering businesses' willingness to invest in Amazon infrastructure.
That sentiment gets to a larger point about AWS though - the service seems to be popular in the startup community, providing the IT infrastructure for young companies and allowing them to avoid investing in expensive technology themselves. But Mark Bowker, a cloud analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group, says Amazon hasn't been as popular in the enterprise community. "Amazon's made it really easy for pretty much anyone to spin up cloud services or get VMs," he says. Where is Amazon getting those customers from? Some are developers and engineers who get frustrated by their own IT shops not being able to supply VMs as quickly as Amazon can, so they use Amazon's cloud in the shadows of IT. "Taxi cabs pay for a lot of VMs," says Beth Cohen, an architect at consultancy Cloud Technology Partners, referring to users expensing Amazon services on travel reports. The point is there's a hesitation by some enterprises to place their Tier 1, mission critical applications in a public cloud.
There is a view by some though that Rackspace has married itself to OpenStack, perhaps to its own detriment. As the Gartner report on OpenStack states, OpenStack can be successful independently of Rackspace's success now that the company has ceded control of the project to a foundation. Overall, Bartonelli says Rackspace's involvement in OpenStack is positive for the company and will only help to position it as a leading alternative to Amazon.
Microsoft
And for good reason, he says. Microsoft owns a lot of back office IT operations for enterprises between Office, Exchange and SharePoint. Because of that real estate the company already has in the enterprise market, Microsoft has an opportunity to extend those customers into its cloud, Bowker says. Microsoft has been more aggressive than ever in recent months about encouraging customers and partners to join its cloud. Earlier this year the company rolled out on-demand Windows and Linux-based virtual machines and cloud storage to accompany its platform as a service as well.
Combined with the release of Windows Server 2012 and Windows System Server this year, Microsoft is also making a play for powering private clouds behind a company's firewall. That will help Microsoft craft a story for customers to have hybrid cloud deployments all powered by Microsoft and its Hyper-V virtualization software. "Amazon doesn't have as strong of a play in the hybrid cloud conversation," Bartonelli says, which - combined with Microsoft's strong relationships with a large number of enterprise IT shops - could be an advantage for the company moving forward.
Google
If anyone can compete with Amazon on scale, it's Google, says George Reese, founder of enStratus, a cloud management company. Amazon may have the largest scale in the industry, which Rackspace is attempting to match. But Reese says Google has a lot of data centers that are optimized for massive scaling, which is heavy artillery in cloud battles.
Google's play thus far has been focused on application development and hosting. It got into the game with Google App Engine, a development platform, and has since - like Microsoft - expanded into the infrastructure-as-a-service space with Google Compute Engine, giving customers an on-demand virtual machine and storage service. It also has a consumer cloud-facing service in Google Drive, seen as a competitor to Microsoft's SkyDrive.
"Google's not trying to displace Microsoft or Windows developers, nor are they necessarily trying to displace Rackspace," Barontelli says. "They're really going directly after Amazon on pricing and capacity saying 'Hey, we've got scale too.'"
But Amazon's been in the cloud game longer than Google, and both companies suffer from a lack of perceived support for users. But the strengths of Google's platform, and its activities in the startup community, could make it a viable competitor in the cloud market.
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