Should Cloud Builders Build or Buy Value-Added Intra-Cloud Services?

In previous posts, I've outlined the important, exciting, but oft-overlooked concept of "Intra-Cloud Computing." As more and more big players made HUGE capital investments in building out their own Clouds, presumably with the goal of attracting software projects, the question arises: What strategy should they use to build the "killer cloud" ?

Clearly there's a certain degree of infrastructure investment: Computers, networking, power, redundancy, security, etc. Arista Networks clearly sees this opportunity and is targetting Intra-Cloud Networking to help cloud builders gain an advantage on networking. I for one have experienced things like memcached performance being 2-3x slower in EC2 than it would be on a small cluster in a data center. If anything, we who build apps in clouds should expect them to have better network performance than a data center, not worse.

Related to my earlier post regarding AWS Start-up finalists and the importance (apparently to Amazon) of perception, I should re-phrase the question that drives the thesis of this blog: What strategy should cloud builders use to build the perception that theirs is "the killer cloud?"

The hardware, virtualization technology and associated tools, and the network are incredibly important to cloud builders. They must focus their to build a reputation of reliability, security, and performance. When it comes to reliability, the market is VERY sensitive to even one event, as we've seen with Amazon S3's outages. Just imagine the first major release of "private" information from a cloud and the associated fall-out in the market for the unlucky cloud builder. In these still early days of building out clouds, these vendors should stay focused on reliability, security, and performance. Also key to their perceived value is the customers' ability to provision machines on demand - and just as importantly, to de-provision when demand falls. Unlike other data center models, virtualization within "A Cloud" is of key importance. This bodes well for companies like RightScale and Elastra.

The services that AWS provides, e.g. Simple Storage Service (S3), Simple Queue Service (SQS), etc., are great value adds to the EC2 environment. These make certain things possible and/or easier that are critical to leveraging "A Cloud." What's interesting is that neither S3 nor SQS are true intra-cloud services. In fact, S3 pre-dated EC2 historically, and let's face it, for the types of files we use with S3, network performance and latency are not always all that important. Still, these services are less expensive and better performance when used from within the AWS cloud.

What Cloud Builders need to differentiate the completeness of their eco-system are true intra-cloud services. These services should be as easy to use as S3 or SQS, but should leverage something that didn't exist before: the reliability, low latency, bandwidth, and security that exists within a cloud.

Since Cloud Builders are so busy building their secure, reliable, scalable, easily-managed infrastructures, they should partner with software vendors who specialize in intra-cloud services - easy to use web services which allow software developers to focus on their core and outsource (cloud-source?) the rest.