Nnamdi Orakwue, VP of Dell Cloud

The company’s first public cloud partners are Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag. The rationale: Dell customers don’t want to be locked into a single cloud vendor and would like assurances that workloads can be moved as needed if their requirements change or their current cloud is not up to snuff. ZeroLag gives Dell a VMware-based cloud option.

There are two takeaways from the news, Nnamdi Orakwue, VP of Dell Cloud, said in an interview on Monday. “First, private cloud success is our bread and butter there our top priority on the open-source side is OpenStack. The second is multi-cloud management and helping our customers deal with it via Enstratius.” The Enstratius management offering supports more than 20 different clouds.

Orakwue acknowledged that Dell’s cloud strategy has been a work in progress. Late last year, the company said its public cloud would be based on OpenStack and would come out a year later than expected. Today’s news changes that.

Dell may add other cloud partners to the mix later and could take an equity stake in some of them. (GigaOM’s Derrick Harris wrote in 2011 that Joyent would be a smart investment for Dell if it’s serious about the cloud biz.)

On the one hand, Orakwue said Dell will be “platform agnostic,” on the other he said OpenStack is clearly its platform of choice on the private cloud side. You have to wonder if that’s a consolation prize for the OpenStack faithful.

Things are heating up on the public cloud front for sure. VMware is expected to re-announce its public cloud platform – which will run in as-yet-unnamed partner data centers — on Tuesday and the whole topic of public, private and hybrid cloud deployments will doubtless come up at GigaOM’s Structure event in San Francisco next month.

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The topic arose at the clouderati-filled Cloud 2020 meetup in Las Vegas last week (where someone suggested we’ll have a cloud duopoly of Amazon Web Services and Google) and it’s back in the public eye again this week with the general availability of Google Compute Engine. I think we might get an idea how the cloud computing market will play out by looking at the fast-food industry.

The analogy goes like this: Fast food restaurants offer their consumers essentially the same things as public clouds offer their customers – convenience, speed, standardization, flexibility and everything else that comes with not having to prepare a meal from scratch or deploy applications on physical gear. And if all anyone wanted was fast, cheap hamburgers, fries and maybe some sort of chicken sandwich, the more than 33,000 McDonald’s across the world would probably do the trick.

However, when I come to any major intersection in a big city (and even in some small towns), I usually see no less than two national fast food chains taking up corner real estate. If I drive a little down the road, I’ll likely see a few more, and possibly some regional chains thrown in, as well.

Not all hamburgers are created equal, it seems.

Why should cloud computing be any different? If all anyone wanted was a virtual server, they’d probably go with the omnipresent Amazon Web Services. But when features, price, security, network connectivity and related services come into play, it becomes easy to see why there’s such an appetite for more options.

Amazon is to McDonald’s as Google is to …

Amazon Web Services = McDonald’s and Yum Brands rolled into one: AWS is to the cloud what McDonald’s is to fast food. It was the first, it’s the biggest and it’s the best known. All things being equal, there would be no reason for anyone to go anywhere else for cloud computing because AWS delivers reasonable services at a fair price (sometimes downright cheap), is omnipresent and can pretty much handle whatever scale you throw at it.

Only, if we consider the virtual server the hamburger of public cloud, the object store the French fries and the cloud database a chicken sandwich, AWS starts to look like a lot more than just a McDonald’s. You might look at it more like Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. The Amazon platform is about far more than just machine images and some standard storage and database features. It has myriad services covering everything from configuration to big data, and they’re all designed to integrate tightly with one another — like one of those KFC/Taco Bell combination restaurants that dot the urban landscape.

AWS, like McDonald’s, is the undisputed champion. Source: Wikipedia Commons

Rackspace = Wendy’s: Wendy’s is the No. 2 fast-food franchise in the United States, a title I think Rackspace probably holds in the cloud space (although assessing cloud market share is a little more difficult than assessing fast-food market share). And much like Wendy’s places a premium on the quality of its products, Rackspace places a premium on the quality of its service. CEO Lanham Napier has gone so far as to say it’s “playing a different game” than Amazon.

What he means is that Rackspace doesn’t need to compete with AWS by constantly driving down prices because Rackspace customers value service and will pay for it. Maybe, but the company might take a hint from what’s happening with Wendy’s as it struggles to maintain its No. 2 status against a feisty Burger King that’s largely following the McDonald’s playbook. If market share is important, higher prices aren’t often the best recipe for maintaining it.

The Angry Whopper, like App Engine, probably isn’t for everyone.

Google = Burger King: That cloud version of Burger King nipping at Rackspace’s heels is Google. It already has all the standard fare in servers, storage and databases, but it’s also hipper than the rest (or at least it tries to be), it takes some chances on product design (sometimes to the love-it-or-hate-it extreme) and, like Burger King with the Whopper, what it does well, it does really well. In Google’s case, that’s perform at scale.

If Google keeps adding services and cutting the costs of everything, there’s no reason it can’t become the world’s No. 2 cloud provider — some have already bestowed that honor upon it — and maybe challenge AWS a decade down the road.

Microsoft = Arby’s: Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to market it otherwise, Windows Azure is still largely viewed as a cloud platform for running .NET applications and generally doing all things Windows. Not that that’s a bad thing — a lot of people really like Windows and, by many accounts, Windows Azure is a fine platform. It’s like going to Arby’s: the menu offers a lot of things, but you go for the roast beef.

Joyent, Virtustream, CloudSigma et al = In-N-Out Burger, Culvers, Five Guys et al: These cloud providers, like their analogous restaurant chains, are damn good at what they do and their patrons are loyal. They’re typically designed for maximum performance, maybe security, too, and will play around with new infrastructural or programming components in order to maintain their edge. They might even be the best at certain things and have some major customers (I’ve seen Maseratis leaving the In-N-Out drive-thru), but cost, geography or the desire to get a chicken sandwich, too, limit the number of users they can attract.

Yes, In-N-Out is delicious — and that’s about the entire menu.

VMware = Del Taco: According to my colleage Barb Darrow, VMware’s new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will “be run from partner data centers and sold by VMware’s channel but managed by VMware.” Del Taco sounds like a Mexican place but also has hamburgers, fries, shakes and even iced coffee. And I don’t know anyone who eats there.

OpenStack = Frozen French fries, or cheeseburger-flavored Doritos: It really depends on who you ask (some would even say it’s like kale). If you’re grilling burgers and cooking fries, you’re essentially trying to recreate the fast-food experience at home. On the bright side, when you’re making the hamburger patties and cooking the fries, you can control how much salt you add and ensure everyone who handles them washes their hands. It might turn out great, but it’s never really the same.

Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m beginning to suspect that OpenStack-based public clouds (of the non-Rackspace( rax) variety) will end up being a lot like cheeseburger-flavored Doritos. In name, they’re like cheeseburgers, but after a few bites you’re left saying, “Hey, Doritos doesn’t make cheeseburgers …”

Everyone else = everyone else: Even after all this, we’re still left a bunch of different cloud providers and a bunch of different fast food chains. You might compare the telcos to Jack in the Box, Carl’s Jr. and Hardees in that they’re big and make money, but they’re pretty much non-factors in the grand scheme of things. Then there are your various web hosts and others, which might compare with some local chain restaurants. And different countries will certainly have their own cloud providers just like they have their own takes on fast food.

In the end, though, it’s just hard to see how cloud computing becomes a two-horse race any more than the fast-food industry is a two-horse race. Sure, there are three clear leaders (with No. 1 having a big lead), but there’s plenty of business to go around because aside from some core similarities, no two providers are the same. And as long as more applications are developed and need a cloud to call home, there will be developers and CIOs with very different ideas of what makes a cloud platform great.

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Opscode, the name behind the Chef tools that many developers use to automate the configuration and deployment of IT, has got more than a toehold in the cloud landscape. Earlier this week Joyent, another cloud provider, said it was integrating Chef into the Joyent cloud.

As I wrote then, tools like Chef, CFEngine and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. A key benefit is that, once the associated scripts of a deployment are created, they can be deployed regardless of the underlying operating system or, in this case, cloud. At least in theory.

Opscode VP of marketing Jay Wampold says IBM and Microsoft’s moves show that enterprise customers are ready for cloud-type deployments. “If you look back over a decade, you see that Google, Facebook and Amazon figured out how to leverage large-scale infrastructure to deliver to consumers built from the ground up on code. Now you’re seeing major [older] enterprises moving IT from a back-office support function for internal operations into a front-office effort that is a touch point for consumers,” Wampold said.

That means enterprises need to develop, configure, test, deploy and monitor applications in web time and at web scale, which is where the devops movement and tools like Chef and Puppet come in. IBM bought UrbanCode, another devops player, earlier this week.

The devops school pushes developers and IT people to work together on fast, incremental tech deployments rather than at cross-purposes. Where Chef and Puppet differ is that Chef focuses more on developers while Puppet concentrates on admins — the “ops” side of devops.

As part of this deal, Opscode has agreed to support IBM’s AIX Unix operating system.

The news of the past few months seems to indicate that Chef has momentum  – although an IT person who watches this space would not give Chef the edge, necessarily. “Chef and Puppet both seem to be doing great. The push by AWS and Joyent is probably more a function of the fact that Chef is easier to stand up as a hosted service than Puppet,” he noted.

Another factor could be that VMware recently invested $30 million more in Puppet, something that makes some businesses wary> The fear is that Puppet won’t be totally dedicated to heterogeneous environments, a worry that Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies denies. The VMware relationship does help Puppet in the private cloud market  but “we’re not changing our roadmap for VMware, and they don’t have anything resembling a controlling stake,” Kanies said via email.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Expect more pledges of support to come out of Opscode’s annual conference kicking off tomorrow in San Francisco. Tools like Chef and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. One key benefit is that, once the associated scripts of a deployment are created, they can be deployed regardless of the underlying operating system or, in this case, cloud. At least in theory.

In Opscode parlance, Chef configurations are deployed and managed via a “cookbook.” Joyent’s support of Chef means it will be easier, going forward, for customer to move cloud deployments to and from any cloud, said Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman in a recent interview.

“Chef, rather than the bare APIs, thus becomes the abstraction layer,” Hoffman told me. “By supporting Chef we make workloads more mobile. If Amazon calls an instance M1 why don’t we have one?” If that nomenclature is standard across clouds, the various scripts will work more easily anywhere.

That means, in Hoffman’s view, that folks who’ve deployed workloads in AWS, but want better and more explicit service level agreements or other contractual terms that AWS may not grant, can move the whole kit-and-kaboodle over to Joyent or, truth be told, vice versa.

As to why Chef appears to be gaining so much traction over CF Engine and Puppet? Hoffman thinks it’s because Opscode is more aligned with developers whereas Puppet targets admins, or the “ops” constituency of devops. In January, Puppet received an additional $30 million investment from VMware, funding which leads some to see Puppet falling into the VMware camp — a contention that Puppet CEO Luke Kanies denied at the time of the deal, pledging to continue support for heterogeneous hypervisors and environments.

Joyent, along with the various OpenStack-allied vendors, is hoping to take business from Amazon which, to be fair, isn’t taking that potential threat lying down — AWS has been adding more enterprise-friendly features and services recently. Later on Wednesday, we’ll hear about how the EMC and VMware-backed Pivotal Initiative plan to take on AWS and other cloud competitors. And, to further muddy the waters, VMware said on its earnings call Tuesday night that it will launch its public-cloud take, which it calles VMware Hybrid Cloud Service on May 21. We’re going to need a score card.

No doubt we’ll hear more about Hoffman’s vision of mobile cloud workloads and the increasingly competitive cloudscapewhen he takes the stage at Structure 2013 in San Francisco on June 19

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

In his annual letter to shareholders (PDF) on Friday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, reiterated his company’s rage to update features and functions (and then cut prices) on Amazon Web Services.

According to Bezos, AWS which he characterized as a “clear example of internally driven motivation” put out 159 new features and services in 2012 and cut prices 27 times since launching 7 years ago. (Frankly, 27 sounds like an undercount to me, but he’s the boss.)

He also touted Amazon’s commitment to enterprise customers. Amazon has

“… added enterprise service support enhancements, and created innovative tools to help customers be more efficient. AWS Trusted Advisor monitors customer configurations, compares them to known best practices, and then notifies customers where opportunities exist to improve performance, enhance security, or save money. Yes, we are actively telling customers they’re paying us more than they need to. In the last 90 days, customers have saved millions of dollars through Trusted Advisor, and the service is only getting started. All of this progress comes in the context of AWS being the widely recognized leader in its area – a situation where you might worry that external motivation could fail. On the other hand, internal motivation – the drive to get the customer to say “Wow” – keeps the pace of innovation fast.”

The lastest tidbit for enterprise users was this week’s addition of support for Microsoft Hyper-V support in Amazon’s Storage Gateway. For more on Bezos’ letter, here’s  PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen’s take.

Bezos’ letter comes at a time when more observers question whether AWS really is the low-cost option when it comes to non-variable (inelastic) production workloads — as opposed to development and test jobs — but that’s a quibble. Until one or more of the OpenStack crowd or, more likely, Google Compute Engine, hits its stride, AWS remains the public cloud to beat.

OpenStack: the ABM (Anyone But Amazon) alliance?

The OpenStack crowd is getting larger. This week — barring last minute delays at Monday’s board meeting — Juniper Networks and Ericsson — should be aboard the OpenStack Foundation as Gold members, as GigaOM reported Friday. Both companies were already sponsoring companies but board membership brings a bigger financial contribution and presumably more influence. With them in the fold and especially after VMware joined last summer, it’s become easier to list which vendors are not in the OpenStack ecosystem than those who are. And that list would be Amazon, Google, Joyent, Microsoft and Oracle.

OpenStack, when it was born more than 3 years ago was an attempt by Rackspace and NASA to build an open-source alternative to Amazon in the public cloud and to prevent VMware from leveraging its virtualization lock in enterprise data centers into the cloud. The effort, as measured by by third-party vendor support has exploded since then, especially after Rackspace turned over the reins to the OpenStack Foundation two years ago. Since then the floodgates opened with HP, IBM, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, joining younger companies — like Cloudscaling, Nebula, Piston Cloud (see disclosure) on the effort. Let’s see, that would be Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Joyent. Or as Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman quipped — giving his company top billing OpenStack would be the “Anybody but JAMOG” alliance.

Piston Cloud updates

Perhaps seeking to beat the rush that’s bound to come next week at the OpenStack Summit, Piston Cloud (see disclosure) brought out Release 2.0 of its OpenStack cloud, or as InformationWeek called it “OpenStack on a stick.”

According to Informationweek:

“The customer sets a few configuration parameters on the cloud key memory stick, then inserts it into the USB port of a top-of-rack’s Ethernet switch. The system loads into the Linux server space of the switch, discovers the servers in the rack, and configures them into a system with virtual machine provisioning, pooled storage and networking and cloud management.”

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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A report I wrote for GigaOM Pro in June 2010 (subscription req’d), entitled “Defining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware,” seems like a good starting point for a private-cloud startup edition of “where are they now.” Ignoring the public companies on the list for the time being (with the exception of CA), here’s what has happened to the private companies and startups.

1. Abiquo: Abiquo has a new CEO, a tight partnership with NEC around selling to service providers and appears focused on the European market. The company raised about $14 million in 2010, but hasn’t really made a lot of noise stateside since then.
2. Appistry: Appistry made a huge shift in August 2011 and it now positions itself as a platform for running high-performance applications in areas such as life sciences, defense and financial services. Its biggest area of focus is genomics, where it is even developing new methods for analyzing genomes.
3. CA: CA bought a bunch of cloud startups in 2009 and 2010 — Cassatt, 3Tera, Oblicore and Nimsoft among them — but it has been essentially silent since then in terms of real innovation. Maybe these acquisitions are driving big business, but I was expecting a more-visionary strategy in terms of fusing them into a cohesive and forward-looking whole.
4. Cloud.com: Winner!!! Cloud.com had big-name users and workable technology, and it sold itself to Citrix for more than $200 million in 2011. It has since launched an open source competitor to OpenStack called Apache CloudStack and appears to be doing good business.
5. Elastra: Elastra is no more.
6. Enomaly: Enomaly’s products still technically exist, but Virtustream bought the company in 2011 with the primary goal of repurposing its intellectual property in the realm of cloud federation and gaining a toehold in China.
7. Eucalyptus Systems: If you ask CEO Marten Mickos, everything is great with Eucalyptus, and its whopping $55.5 million in venture capital (including a $30 million round in April 2012) and tens of thousands of downloads of its Amazon-compatible cloud softwware are proof. Ask anyone else and they’ll likely tell a different story.
8. GigaSpaces: GigaSpaces appears to be doing well enough, although it was around well before the term “private cloud.” It has always been much more about its in-memory data grid tech and apps that need dynamic scalability, although it does now offer a Platform-as-a-Service product that’s somewhat disconnected from the legacy business.
9. Joyent: Joyent has always been respected for its engineering chops, although rumors sometimes swirl about how much business the company — which has raised an incredible $115 million — is actually bringing in. Still, it continues to improve its public and private cloud offerings and has landed some big-name users.
10. Librato: Librato looks to have abandoned its resource-management product line to focus on measuring stuff — sensors, server use, whatever.  It wears that hat well, and Heroku is among its loyal users.
11. LongJump: In hindsight, LongJump’s business was not actually a great fit for that 2010 report, and its business appears about the same: you build apps in a user-friendly setting and they can run on LongJump’s infrastructure or your own.
12. Morphlabs: Morphlabs is the master of pivots, although it’s still hanging around and pushing out new products. Now an OpenStack-based cloud-software vendor, it released a new service-provider-focused platform called mCloud Osmium in February.
13. Nimbula: Nimbula, as noted above, is now part of Oracle in a move that is widely believed to be an “acquihire” situation, although neither company will comment on the details.
14. Platform Computing: IBM bought Platform Computing in October 2011 and appears to have refocused the company around its HPC roots. Not that that’s a bad thing — Platform was a $72 million company on its own in a niche market, and I’d guess IBM paid a fair price for it.
15. Virtustream: Another winner! Virtustream has been on fire since 2010 (actually buying up Enomaly) and looks to be the darling of the enterprise cloud space. It’s primarily a public cloud provider, but it has a strong private/hybrid cloud business that ties Virtustream back to customers’ data centers.
16. Voxel: Voxel, whose main business was a public cloud offering, got acquired for $30 million by managed hosting provider Internap in January 2012.

OpenStack is what happened to the private cloud market and forced so many acquisitions, pivots and even one closure. Users, investors and everyone, really, were waiting for some promise of cloud interoperability and portability (aka something other than Amazon, VMware or Microsoft) and OpenStack delivered it. Further, for the service provider community — which has arguably bolstered the sales of private cloud software since its inception — OpenStack provided a relatively engineering-free path to public cloud offerings (compared with building their own from scratch, that is) without fear of being at the mercy of a startup that might fold tomorrow and take its core technology with it.

I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet the majority of venture capital going toward “private cloud” in the past two years has gone to OpenStack-based startups. We’ve also seen nearly every large software vendor pin its cloud ambitions to OpenStack to some degree — Cisco, HP, IBM and Red Hat to name a few. Even Rackspace is now in the private cloud game thanks to OpenStack.

For buyers, a large, well-heeled and deep-pocketed community has to be more appealing than a disparate collection of startups all doing their own thing.

L to R: Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus, Chris Kemp of Nebula (an OpenStack startup) and Sameer Dholakia of Citrix at Structure 2012.
(c) Pinar Ozger

Who’s not doing OpenStack (at least in any meaningful way)? VMware, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services — all companies with their own intellectual property, huge user bases and lots of money to back their visions. They all also have strong public cloud connections (some, obviously, stronger than others).

The cloud startups from 2010 that are still arguably thriving today share similar characteristics. They’ve been big on engineering, won major customers early on and raised a lot of money to help them maintain through any tough times. All but Cloud.com, now part of Citrix, have a very prominent public cloud component, too — which appears critical for a truly seamless hybrid environment — but it has staked out its own claim as the anti-OpenStack.

All of the aforementioned companies are/were doing infrastructure as a service primarily, but we’re already seeing a similar thing happen in the platform-as-a-service space thanks to Cloud Foundry. Providers that weren’t part of that community are jumping on board, and it’s just a few established holdovers that look like they’ll be able to push forward without riding Cloud Foundry’s coattails.

Perhaps this is telling for how the future of anything at the infrastructure or platform layers is going to play out. You’re either really early and really good, or you wait for an open source project — OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hadoop, Open Compute, OpenFlow, etc. — and try to build on that. There’s following fast, and there’s following smart.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Alexey Repka.

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While there has been a Node.js download available for RHEL and its cousins Fedora and CentOS via the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), there was no formal support from Red Hat or Joyent (the company behind Node.js) and Node.js itself is not included in the Red Hat distribution. Besides Red Hat/CentOS release 6.3, Strongloop Node also supports:

• Debian/Ubuntu 12.10 (DEB)
• Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 (PKG)
• Microsoft Windows 7 (MSI)

The official support and service that Strongloop provides could be critical for RHEL developers who want to make use of Node.js’ event-driven talents. Now if a RHEL developer has an issue or problem with Node.js he or she has to go to the mailing list for help. “Now they can get support from us and we write Node.js,” Tsang told me.

As Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman once told GigaOM, Node.js is a very good way to write high-performance servers that need to handle APIs and facilitate very fast data ingress and egress. Those are attributes that might come in handy for enterprise developers.

Strongloop’s news comes the same day Node.js v. 10.0 debuted.

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Robert Rizika, CEO of ProfitBricks, USA

Wanted: Startups to use our clouds

ProfitBricks USA is the latest to tout its ability to successfully woo startups — it claims 35 to 40 percent of 130 startups that have come aboard left AWS. And today it launched a nationwide program to convince more startups to “break up with Amazon on Valentine’s Day.” Qualified startups — those making less than $1 million in annual revenue — get a 20 percent discount on ProfitBricks IaaS services for a year. A limited version of the promotion rolled out in Boston five weeks ago.

CEO Robert Rizika, who explained ProfitBricks’ take on scale-up cloud computing, said the company offers a modern cloud for a modern era — one with a graphical dashboard to make it easier for mere mortals to deploy infrastructure with drag-and-drop ease. And it offers resources by the minute, not by the hour, which has been the AWS model. ProfitBricks pricing is here.

Some background; Since AWS launched in 2006, startups have flocked to its inexpensive compute and storage infrastructure. In essence, AWS decimated barriers to entry for dot.com boom startups. Until AWS showed up, those fledgling companies  pretty much had to turn a huge chunk of their VC money over to Oracle for database licenses and Sun Microsystems for hardware. Amazon was the only game in town when it came to reliable infrastructure for rent cheap.

Changing times mean changing clouds?

But things have changed. For one thing, a bunch of other very capable, albeit smaller, IaaS players have arrived. They may not be as huge as Amazon, but they’re plenty big for most purposes.

And, while startups were quite happy to rely on low-level Amazon services, many are less wild about moving up to higher-level and more complex AWS offerings like Simple Workflow Services, which make it difficult for them to back out of Amazon if they want to change cloud providers. Some see Amazon’s ever expanding list of services as competitive to their own plans. Many Amazon partners/customers, whether it’s due to fear of lock-in or fear of competition with their primary cloud provider, now run on multiple clouds.

They also find it hard to track the constant  pricing changes and tweaks that get posted to the AWS blog seemingly every other day.  A whole flock of startups has grown up around explaining AWS usage and pricing to AWS customers. So much for transparency. Dissidents also complain that to get the best AWS price, they have to lock into 1- or 3-year contracts for Reserved Instances.

“With us, you automatically get the lowest price, our menu is all graphical — you drag and drop — you don’t need to be an expert to order up your resources,” Rizika said.

Amazon’s enterprise shift

Others say Amazon’s growing focus on enterprise accounts,  a big theme at its inaugural AWS: Reinvent conference last November, is diluting its focus on startup customers.

Whatever the case, two things are certain: First, more credible IaaS players are coming online by the month. Second: Amazon has no intention of ceding ground to any of them. It’s gonna be an interesting year.

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Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle

The new funding comes after a similar undisclosed investment from  In-Q-Tel, an investment company tied to the US intelligence sector, and before that about $4 million in capital from Avalon Ventures and Y Combinator.

Cloudant’s DBaaS is a managed service helps developers focus on their applications, not the underlying cloud infrastructure, which in Cloudant’s case can be Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, Joyent, Microsoft Azure and SoftLayer. 

Samsung obviously sees that appeal. In a statement, Samsung Ventures America’s senior investment manager Hyuk-Jeen Suh, said his company:

“believes a globally distributed data layer and management of that data is especially critical for large enterprise businesses … We felt that this is the right time to strategically invest in Cloudant to support the company’s vision to manage the proliferation of data to be created by, for example, mobile devices, machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies, and the ‘Internet of things’ in the future.”

Cloudant’s appeal is that it can place its processing and aggregation power where it’s needed, CEO Derek Schoettle told me last year. The Boston-based company was founded by three MIT physicists. Schoettle, a former VP at Vertica Systems, came aboard as CEO two years ago.

Indeed as more people carry more mobile devices and as the use of sensors explodes, the amount of data that needs to be aggregated and processed will only keep growing. That creates a need for a widely distributed database (or database service) that can be placed close to that data. That’s a big opportunity for the companies that can capitalize on it.

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Offering a Hadoop service is pretty much part and parcel of being a cloud provider at this point. By rolling out its own offering, Joyent joins the ranks of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, GoGrid, IBM and, soon enough, Rackspace. Joyent’s Hadoop service is based on the Hortonworks Data Platform (as are the Microsoft and Rackspace offerings) and — according to Joyent — runs three times faster than some other cloud-based Hadoop services.

Jason Hoffman at Structure Europe 2012 (Credit: JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY http://www.juliadeboer.com)

This is so, according to Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman, in part because Joyent’s cloud architecture is highly persistent (i.e., storage and compute are co-located and non-ephemeral), which means Joyent can bring the MapReduce processors to the data. In other cloud environments, data — potentially lots of it in the case of Hadoop jobs — might have to traverse a network in order to reach the Hadoop processors, running into variable performance and issues along the way.

However, while Joyent’s high-performance architecture certainly attracts a higher class of customer (Telefonica is among its early Hadoop users and Hoffman said deployments well into the hundreds of nodes aren’t uncommon), Hoffman said the accompanying higher price means Joyent misses out on a lot of the individual and startup users that have helped drive AWS’s popularity.

AWS, for what it’s worth, might take issue with this classification. Its significant lead in the number of users on its cloud platform isn’t attributable entirely to low costs and spendthrift startups. Netflix is one notable user, and the company claims a large number of enterprise users for both its computing and big-data-focused services.

Still, there’s plenty of business in Joyent’s high-end world. Hoffman said the company’s private-cloud software business is doing very well and the Hadoop offering will ship as software, too. Customers that have servers in data centers where Joyent also has locations, such as the SuperNAP facility in Las Vegas, can deploy hybrid Hadoop environments without having to worry about data ever having to travel across the internet or even a dedicated cross-country connection.

Joyent’s Haddop architecture

But Joyent does see a lot of opportunity to win a broader range of customers now that it’s officially in the big data space. Hadoop is just the starting point, Hoffman said, and the company will release more offerings to support transactional workloads, real-time processing and other things that Hadoop is not presently designed to do. New technologies mean new options for customers — Telefonica, for example, is trying to productize its own mountains of data and sell it as a service to retailers (something Sprint is trying to do, as well).

“I wholeheartedly believe it’s going to be those types of unique usages with data that will drive enterprise adoption,” Hoffman said. “The whole point of computers is to do things with data.”

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