Crane Consulting

The alternative cloud refers to an entire segment of the cloud industry that covers entire swaths of needs and services which are unfeasable for the larger cloud hyperscalers.

While AWS, GCP, or Azure offer the ability to enourmously scale ones business leveraging proprietary software (for a hefty cost). The alternative cloud is characterized by its focus on individualized, tailored solutions and an adoption of open source software.

In the several decades that the cloud industry has begun and subsequently boomed, the availability of options and different solutions has increased exponentially from where it began. Whereas previously high end software was vendor locked to large corporations and expensive B2B contracts, the industry has vastly changed to become what it is today.

Our world is ever more connected today, and along with that comes the free exchange of ideas. A concept embodied best by the advent of Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Whereas creating even a single database to processing large amounts of digital data once required entire IT departments and dedicated budgets, anyone accross the globe can today obtain the software to run countless numbers of the same software at a fraction of the cost and complexity.

This inlies the strength of the alternative cloud. Spured by the recent explosion in the cloud industry, and with the continued improvement of FOSS software there exists today opportunities for business to leverage new software which once would have been far too prohibitively costly. As new services and software continue to improve, so too does the oportunity to use them in creative and new ways to improve a buisnesses operations.

Some of the major players in this space include so called Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) providers. Providers who’s specialty is in offering high end hardware and compute resources for a fraction of the normal cost. The challenge exists in bringing those resources to bear with efficient and innovative software.

The differntiator between the vast majority of businesses and those that effectively use AWS is that the later necessitate resources which require enourmous amounts of supporting infrastructure. However for the vast majority of businesses that are not multi-national corporations, those resources are unnecessary. And yet due simply to the economics of what the hyperscalers are offering, the pricing structure is scalled similarly between enourmous corporations and even the smallest buiseness.

Put simply, buisnesses are paying more for things they will not need.

The same workflow that is run on an amazon ec2 instance can be run on a dedicated server from any one of the many alternative cloud providers, and for only a fraction of the cost.

My business specializes in that boundry between your needs and the vast, complicated landscape of the cloud industry. With years of experience working in all manners of the cloud industry, I can help you find a tailored solution that works best for your buisness. Nothing more, and nothing less.