How clouds can and will differ

July 16, 2008

For CloudCamp London today, we are sharing an overview of “How clouds can and will differ”.

We believe that even within cloud infrastructure there are significant differences between providers, based on:

• Physical location: Location of infrastructure determines network speed of users and data jurisdiction
• Target users: Target users determine features and services offered in addition to raw virtual servers
• SLA: Whether they offer a SLA with financial penalties if broken, level of SLA determines redundancy of infrastructure and hence price of product
• Server config: Whether they offer a full range of operating system images, with flexibility to instantly rescale server sizes and total capacity to any level
• Web UI and API: Whether they offer infrastructure management via both intuitive web interface, and API (fitting standards when they emerge)

ElasticHosts will be the second UK-based cloud infrastructure provider to launch — and we believe that our UK physical location will make us extremely attractive for UK-based customers, due to:

• Much better network latency and bandwidth if cloud infrastructure is on the same continent as users (<3 vs. >50 milliseconds)
• No legal conflicts if single legal jurisdiction covers host and buyer (e.g. US Patriot Act investigations, overseas data limits imposed by EU Directive on Personal Data Protection)