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Increasingly, Microsoft seems to be taking the same approach, at least with its Azure line of products where you can buy “service” separately from the actual cl

Increasingly, Microsoft seems to be taking the same approach, at least with its Azure line of products where you can buy “service” separately from the actual cloud product.

bigiain 8y ago
Not _super_ surprising. AWS has spawned an entire industry who provide addon services/support for it (and if I were those companies, I'd be waiting for the Bezos shoe to drop and eat the entire space's profit). The company I work for has a bunch of clients who outsource all of their AWS capability - usually in insanely expensive and inflexible ways...
- alfredallan1 8y ago
  Of course, even companies like Salesforce, SAP have little cottage industries sprung up around them that do the “requirement analysis”, setup, maintenance, etc. I always wonder if it’d not be effectively cheaper to hire a parttime sysadmin to manage one’s own servers than all this trouble companies now go to with AWS/Azure. A while back, I had a good look at the AWS offerings, and they were alluring enough to someone in the early stages of anything. But the initial knowledge-barrier is not too low (there are even courses on AWS) - so why wouldn’t I instead to use my preexisting Unix skills to do it by hand; and why wouldn’t a beginner choose to learn the (not too hard, and IMO of comparable complexity as AWS) basics of handling storage etc in Unix than to pay a vendor. The moment one is at even intermediate scale, having one’s own setup seems more practical.
  - noobiemcfoob 8y ago
    Because the full value of AWS or other offerings is in not maintaining the servers and backbones they run on.
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  I think Rackspace is now entirely on top of AWS, whereas before they used to be a competitor in the cloud space.
  - alfredallan1 8y ago
    Might I ask for a source on that? I know that they provide services for AWS, but they still have their own offerings just the same. There’s no real reason for Rackspace to dump its massive existing infrastructure and move to AWS. So the only new thing is a service department for AWS customers.
    - ddtaylor 8y ago
      A sales person from the company contacted me a while ago to offer services, Jessica De La Garza <Jessica.DeLaGarza@rackspace.com> and talked about their services. They have always been about their "Fanatical Support"
      - alfredallan1 8y ago
        Yes, they do support AWS instances on behalf of clients. It is indeed a new service they’ve added to their roster. But their own servers, networks, all product offerings are what they were.
        ddtaylor 8y ago
        The sales woman must have taken a bit of liberty with her words. I haven't used them in a couple of years, I did really like their "Cloud Sites" offering they had.

Increasingly, Microsoft seems to be taking the same approach, at least with its Azure line of products where you can buy “service” separately from the actual cloud product.

bigiain 8y ago

Not _super_ surprising. AWS has spawned an entire industry who provide addon services/support for it (and if I were those companies, I'd be waiting for the Bezos shoe to drop and eat the entire space's profit). The company I work for has a bunch of clients who outsource all of their AWS capability - usually in insanely expensive and inflexible ways...

alfredallan1 8y ago
Of course, even companies like Salesforce, SAP have little cottage industries sprung up around them that do the “requirement analysis”, setup, maintenance, etc. I always wonder if it’d not be effectively cheaper to hire a parttime sysadmin to manage one’s own servers than all this trouble companies now go to with AWS/Azure. A while back, I had a good look at the AWS offerings, and they were alluring enough to someone in the early stages of anything. But the initial knowledge-barrier is not too low (there are even courses on AWS) - so why wouldn’t I instead to use my preexisting Unix skills to do it by hand; and why wouldn’t a beginner choose to learn the (not too hard, and IMO of comparable complexity as AWS) basics of handling storage etc in Unix than to pay a vendor. The moment one is at even intermediate scale, having one’s own setup seems more practical.
- noobiemcfoob 8y ago
  Because the full value of AWS or other offerings is in not maintaining the servers and backbones they run on.
ddtaylor 8y ago
I think Rackspace is now entirely on top of AWS, whereas before they used to be a competitor in the cloud space.
- alfredallan1 8y ago
  Might I ask for a source on that? I know that they provide services for AWS, but they still have their own offerings just the same. There’s no real reason for Rackspace to dump its massive existing infrastructure and move to AWS. So the only new thing is a service department for AWS customers.
  - ddtaylor 8y ago
    A sales person from the company contacted me a while ago to offer services, Jessica De La Garza <Jessica.DeLaGarza@rackspace.com> and talked about their services. They have always been about their "Fanatical Support"
    - alfredallan1 8y ago
      Yes, they do support AWS instances on behalf of clients. It is indeed a new service they’ve added to their roster. But their own servers, networks, all product offerings are what they were.
      - ddtaylor 8y ago
        The sales woman must have taken a bit of liberty with her words. I haven't used them in a couple of years, I did really like their "Cloud Sites" offering they had.