Are cloud hyperscalers necessary? Not for everyone says Linode

'The alternative cloud market is really gaining a lot of momentum', says VP cloud experience Blair Lyon

As we are frequently reminded, the cloud hyperscalers have had a profitable pandemic, continuing to expand revenues add new customers at a rate of knots.

So if you are a specialist cloud infrastructure provider (a hypo-scaler perhaps?) how do you compete with these behemoths? In time-honoured fashion, you specialise in a niche and play to your strengths, says Blair Lyon, VP cloud experience at Linode.

"The alternative cloud market is really gaining a lot of momentum," Lyon said, pointing to the fact that a third of the expanding IaaS pie is made up of smaller players such as Digital Ocean, Hetzner, OVHcloud and Linode itself.

In Linode's case, the audience is mainly developers and engineers in SMEs and hobbyists who want to be able to spin up infrastructure with the minimum of fuss and whose requirements for bells, whistles and other baubles are low. These techies require a core set of 'cloud primitives' such as databases, compute, server, Kubernetes, Terraform and APIs, but not the full panoply of services and applications.

The hyperscalers provide solutions, not infrastructure - Blair Lyon, Linode

"The hyperscalers provide solutions, not infrastructure," said Lyon. While this approach is exactly what many are looking for, it can add unnecessary complexity. Developers are increasingly interested in a multi-cloud approach, he maintains, willing to try different providers, although he admitted that most need a push to expand their horizons.

A survey among 384 developers, architects and engineers in SMEs commissioned by Linode and carried out by Accelerated Strategies found that ‘trust' in a cloud service provider (CSP) was the most important factor to developers.

Of course, trust in the cloud context covers many areas. The hyperscalers are trusted to provide world-beating security and availability and a constant flow of innovations and features; but they are not always trusted to act in their customers' best interest. The Linode survey found a small but significant proportion of developers, analysts and engineers who did not necessarily trust their CSP ‘not to steal their IP' (13 per cent) or ‘not compete against me and put me out of business' (17 per cent), for example.

However, inertia means they don't typically start looking elsewhere "until something unsavoury happens," Lyon said. This could be a bill that comes in way higher expected, or discovering they've developed on a technology that's no longer portable because it's stuck in the hyperscaler's proprietary tool, or it might be a bad support experience.

"Once that happens, they really are much more open to the idea of multi-cloud," Lyon said. "That's where the underlying trust starts to really come to the forefront."

But moving to a new cloud provider can be hard, with trust issues of its own. Security is always the number one issue that developers and engineers are concerned with, says Lyon. Therefore, this is where alternative providers really need to prove themselves.

"Typically security is a top topic that they want to talk about, it's always front of mind. Then it gets into simplicity because managing infrastructure is hard and nobody wants to deal with the pain, so it's about making it easier to do. And then it's typically a tie between price and support."

Individual support is where smaller providers can shine, and Lyon claims that Linode is cheaper for those with basic infrastructure needs, both for VM charges and for data egress. But he said that the company is focused on making it easy for developers to make the switch, including a simple one-click marketplace for core applications and solid integrations and connectors to other services.

VCs are encouraging their startups to avoid the temptation to go all in on one provider

"We'll never have hundreds of enterprise features, we just want to have enough of the core features for those that choose to go this way," he said.

Lyon believes the current talent war for cloud skills as well concerns about the business models of the hyperscalers means the alternative cloud market will continue to grow so long as providers get the basics right.

"Even VCs are encouraging their startups to avoid the temptation to go all in on one provider, even though it might be easier. They're saying stop taking the free money, use the open source tools, use the third party tooling between the cloud and your applications so that you have more ownership and control, and so you can be more portable, and so you own more of that instead of Amazon."

Join us on Wednesday 22nd September for Deskflix: Regrowth in the Age of Cloud