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I'm a (moderately [1]) happy customer. But I have to ask, isn't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management tool

I'm a (moderately [1]) happy customer. But I have to ask, isn't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of that, isn't it just price and DC-location that differentiate? And in that vein, wouldn't the winner in each area just be the one who bought their hardware the most recently? Instructions/dollar are still increasing on each CPU generation, but it'll take more than one generation for each machine to pay itself off. So, whoever is closest to the current generation pays the least per instruction, and can charge the least. Or, maybe it's memory/bandwidth, which are mostly commodity, but slightly bottlenecked by the hardware (e.g, max on a motherboard, NIC throughput). Maybe the combination of prices in cpu, memory, and bandwidth leave enough variation between competitors to keep the field a little open? I donno. [1] Modulo concerns about their ssh key management. I haven't looked after the last news ping on it.

6cxs2hd6 13y ago
> isn't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of that, isn't it just price and DC-location that differentiate? Well, I don't think it's like aircraft or auto leasing. More like apartment or office leasing -- there's also a property management, maintenance, and operation dimension. You're not just paying for hardware in a rack. You're paying for electricity, cooling, fire prevention, connectivity, and some level of uptime. i.e. You're paying for not having to worry about a bunch of stuff, so you can focus on your core business problems. Even with standardized management software, at some point a human needs to go into a cage, or deal with the backhoe emergency. (OK, unless someday Amazon drones are deployed in data centers, instead of doing residential delivery. :))
- lallysingh 13y ago
  I like this analogy. It's like you're leasing an office for your program to work in. It works well for both pricing and differentiation.
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6cxs2hd6 13y ago

> isn't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of that, isn't it just price and DC-location that differentiate? Well, I don't think it's like aircraft or auto leasing. More like apartment or office leasing -- there's also a property management, maintenance, and operation dimension. You're not just paying for hardware in a rack. You're paying for electricity, cooling, fire prevention, connectivity, and some level of uptime. i.e. You're paying for not having to worry about a bunch of stuff, so you can focus on your core business problems. Even with standardized management software, at some point a human needs to go into a cage, or deal with the backhoe emergency. (OK, unless someday Amazon drones are deployed in data centers, instead of doing residential delivery. :))

lallysingh 13y ago
I like this analogy. It's like you're leasing an office for your program to work in. It works well for both pricing and differentiation.

deleted 13y ago

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