Lower AWS EC2 Instances Prices Called Out by Rackspace CTO
Lower AWS EC2 Instances Prices Called Out by Rackspace CTO by UCStrategies Staff
The CTO at Rackspace, John Engates, is calling out its competitor in the cloud space, Amazon Web Services, over the inflation of the value of discounts on dedicated EC2 instances which were announced earlier in the month.
Engates noted that AWS lowered the prices on EC2 instances by around 80 percent, yet it still cost more on a total-cost-for-performance basis than true dedicated servers, such as the ones which are offered by Rackspace.
The per-region fee was also axed by Amazon, from $10 to $2, so there is no longer an extra charge for each region in which a customer operates a dedicated EC2 instance. Engates commented that “a lower unit price doesn't always mean lower costs overall.”
According to Engates, Rackspace is more concerned with support and performance, rather than providing the lowest unit prices. There is more value for the dollar to customers when these factors are put in focus, Engates added, about the Rackspace cloud offering.
He added: “We at Rackspace encourage customers to consider the total cost for the specific level of performance and support that their business requires.”
OpenStack was pioneered by Rackspace, and this also provides more compatibility than the AWS proprietary cloud. However, the “real conflict lies in the way that AWS defines dedicated computing, which is at odds with the view of the rest of the industry, including Rackspace,” said Engles.
EC2 dedicated instances, for example, do not offer true isolation which customers receive from dedicated, bare metal servers which Rackspace operates on. Engates noted that dedicated servers are totally detached from the public cloud.
The dedicated instances from EC2 which operate on the customer’s hardware are connected to Amazon’s public cloud, according to Engates. He stated: “You're just a dedicated, single-tenant slice of that cloud. If the AWS public cloud suffers an outage, you will be affected.”
Amazon did not release a statement in response to Engate’s comments.
Both Rackspace and AWS compete in the public cloud market which Gartner has said will, by the end of 2013, be valued at $130 billion. Both companies have been lowering prices.
The Rackspace CEO, Lanham Napier, said: “AWS absolutely has a head start and has a lot of developer traction. Our personal belief is that open source is a better development model and framework than a proprietary system. Over time, there will be more developers contributing code to OpenStack than Amazon Web Services could ever hire. I just think right now, they got a developer head start, and it's early in the game.” (CY)Link