As cloud and virtual server technology continues to ramp up both in terms of availability and use, companies are gearing up to see who can be a frontrunner in the industry and who will be left behind. Two great examples here are Joystiq and Amazon, both of whom have been trying their best to sell their version of cloud computing technology to the widest possible audience. What initially began as a race simply to see who could attract the most company conversions has now turned into a competition to see which has the better edge in the market – features or performance.
Companies have an increasingly large amount of choice when it comes to their virtual private server and cloud server needs, and for Amazon, that means creating as many features as possible to make the experience streamlined for users. From access to object storage, block storage, Hadoop, GPUs, content delivery networks, etc. Amazon has been pushing a massive feature list out on their EC2 platform since its inception.
Providers like Joystiq, meanwhile, have been focused more on pure server performance, especially in the areas of CPU and I/O metrics. Some studies have performance-based servers running at up to 14 times more efficiently than those that are feature-heavy, especially in the area of I/O and backup writing performance.
What does this mean for companies? For now, that the market is continually evolving to meet customer needs and that two camps have been created – features and performance. Both camps argue they are the best bang for the buck and that only they offer the best virtualization options, but ultimately the choice comes down to what a company needs and which side of the divide can provide the best virtual options.
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