I'm always intrigued by services that rely on an infrastructure layer you don't control.
For example - you are betting that, say, AWS will put in both the best of breed hardware for your particular service - and that also they will manage it, set it up correctly / to your needs, and adjust to your requests.
Yet as a small player - you likely have little negotiating power with them, so how much visibility do you have to their implementations?
Further, there are HW caching and high speed memory layer technologies (FusionIO, Violin memory) that services like yours can greatly benefit from - yet you may not have any option to use such technologies due to reliance on a hosting vendor relationship.
What are your thoughts here?
I think that a hybrid model could be deployed where you define an architecture that is the best for your company and that takes advantages of the strengths of hosting -- for example - you don't want to maintain all the switching, routing and potentially storage gear - but maybe you could define the cache layer and install an maintain that with all your traffic routing through it which front ends to the more traditional offerings of EC2/AWS?
For example - you are betting that, say, AWS will put in both the best of breed hardware for your particular service - and that also they will manage it, set it up correctly / to your needs, and adjust to your requests.
Yet as a small player - you likely have little negotiating power with them, so how much visibility do you have to their implementations?
Further, there are HW caching and high speed memory layer technologies (FusionIO, Violin memory) that services like yours can greatly benefit from - yet you may not have any option to use such technologies due to reliance on a hosting vendor relationship.
What are your thoughts here?
I think that a hybrid model could be deployed where you define an architecture that is the best for your company and that takes advantages of the strengths of hosting -- for example - you don't want to maintain all the switching, routing and potentially storage gear - but maybe you could define the cache layer and install an maintain that with all your traffic routing through it which front ends to the more traditional offerings of EC2/AWS?