For years, enterprise e-commerce couldn’t possibly be deployed anywhere but on premise as CIOs sought to ensure control, stability, and security of key assets and data. Over time, outsourced but dedicated hardware solutions became increasingly in vogue as technology leaders realized that pure play technology hosts could offer better uptime, reliability and, in the end, physical security than they could ensure in their own data centers. The biggest hang-up was if and when true cloud hosting would come of age and become the trusted utility computing model it has promised for many years.
Amazon and AWS were the first (and largest) entrant to the marketplace. Low cost computing power with the ability to scale up and down quickly promised great utility. But what about reliability, guaranteed uptime, and scalability? They were a big deterrent in the early years as merchants dealt with the unannounced server deprecation notices that came from many cloud hosting companies when a piece of virtualized hardware would fail. (more…)