Crane Consulting

The alternative cloud refers to an entire segment of the cloud industry that covers entire swaths of needs and services which are unfeasible for the larger cloud hyperscalers.

While AWS, GCP, or Azure offer the ability to enormously scale ones business leveraging proprietary software (for a hefty cost). The alternative cloud is characterized by its focus on individualized, tailored solutions and an adoption of open source software.

In the several decades that the cloud industry has begun and subsequently boomed, the availability of options and different solutions has increased exponentially from where it began. Whereas previously high end software was vendor locked to large corporations and expensive B2B contracts, the industry has vastly changed to become what it is today.

Put simply, the cloud industry has grown into a fully developed market. And this means the ability to create exactly what your business needs by using a little knowledge and some imagination

Our world is ever more connected today, and along with that comes the free exchange of ideas. A concept embodied best by the advent of Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Whereas creating even a single database to processing large amounts of digital data once required entire IT departments and dedicated budgets, anyone across the globe can today obtain the software to run countless numbers of the same software at a fraction of the cost and complexity.

This inlies the strength of the alternative cloud. Spurred by the recent explosion in the cloud industry, and with the continued improvement of FOSS software, there exists today opportunities for business to leverage software which once would have been far too prohibitively costly. As new services and software continue to improve, so too does the opportunity to use them in creative and new ways to improve a business’s operations.

Some of the major players in this space include so called Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) providers. Providers who’s specialty is in offering high end hardware and compute resources for a fraction of the normal cost. The challenge exists in bringing those resources to bear with efficient and innovative software.

The differentiator between the vast majority of businesses and the ones that do effectively use a hyperscaler, is that the later is usually a business which requires enormous amounts of supporting infrastructure (think Netflix, Disney, or Amazon itself). Thus it makes sense to utilize their planetary scale data services. However for the vast majority of businesses that are not multi-national corporations, those resources are unnecessary. And yet simply because of the economics of what the hyperscalers are offering, the pricing structure is scaled more favorably towards enormous corporations, often causing smaller business’s to lose out without even knowing it.

Put simply, business’s are paying more for things they will not need.

The same workflow that is run on an amazon ec2 instance can be run on a dedicated server from any one of the many alternative cloud providers, and for only a fraction of the cost. The landscape of the cloud industry is vast and complex, and as any good adventurer knows: it is difficult to get an understanding of it all when you have such a limited vantage point. What the hyperscalers offer is both their planetary scale resources but also a guide to walk you through the process, with the vast majority of businesses getting much more use out of the later whether they know it or not. Now every newcomer needs a guide, and businesses should by all means be focused first and foremost on running their business rather than navigating the cloud marketplace. The catch here though is that while these hyperscalers are able to offer a top rate visitor tour guide, what isn’t so easy to see is that the same proprietary software which acts as a guide to abstract away the challenges of deploying infrastructure, also makes it very difficult to make use of different solutions. This leads to high operating costs and vendor lock.

Developers with knowledge about the cloud landscape and the skills to put them to good use represent another guide to help businesses navigate to where they need to be, with a human touch and a better understanding of the problem at hand. This allows them to create a better solution for your business.

The alternative cloud, hand in hand with these knowledgeable developers, represents an optimized, lower cost, and more flexible cloud solution over hyperscalers.