Tiny (comparatively) GoGrid takes on Amazon Web Services

SAN FRANCISCO--Here at the Structure conference, everything is cloud, cloud, cloud. No one wants to own their own Web hardware anymore, it seems, and the company representatives speaking here are happy to provide the software and virtual services to replace the hardware.

One of those is GoGrid, which is shooting for the same cloud-computing market that Amazon.com is making a run at with its EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, service and related Web services.

The GoGrid pitch: We're cheaper. And easier.

GoGrid CEO John Keagy told me that, at volume, his services undercut Amazon's. He charges 8 cents a gigabyte-hour for compute services, compared to EC2's 10 cents. Also, data storage is associated with compute servers, and if a server goes offline, when it comes back, the storage will still be there.

At Structure on Wednesday, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pitched "persistent storage" as a new offering from Amazon.

Keagy also said GoGrid has a graphical user interface-based control panel for its customers, allowing them to quickly set up their compute environment in a simpler manner than Amazon's service allows.

I can't do a hands-on with these two cloud services, but there are a few other points that I found interesting. First, GoGrid offers virtual Windows services, as well as Linux, and about 50 percent of its installations are for Windows processes. Some popular Web 2.0 services, like CommunityServer, are still Windows-only.

Also, GoGrid has never had a system-wide outage, as Amazon has. Keagy is realistic, though: "We're in beta. It will happen to us too." But, he says, with well-designed systems, recovery can be swift.

One thing GoGrid certainly doesn't have is Amazon's scale. Although the company is a division of the well-established ServePath, its single 20,000 square-foot facility can't hold a generator to Amazon's massive distributed infrastructure. Keagy did say he is building out distribution for GoGrid, using more of ServePath's locations.

Like the new Mosso cloud-based storage service, GoGrid is accessible through REST (representational state transfer) application programming interfaces.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

[nottlv]

I've used both GoGrid and AWS, and while GoGrid definitely has some nice features and is easier to use, it's not really cheaper for most use cases. As you start to increase the memory requirements per virtual image, GoGrid starts getting much more expensive, especially for smaller deployments where there is no volume discount. That's probably why the comparisons they demonstrate are typically based on 1GB images. And GoGrid's web based GUI, while nice, can be somewhat duplicated by signing up for a free RightScale developer account.

[rafe]

Excellent input. Thanks.

[rawagajah]

There are a number of more specialized companies such as GoGrid competing with AWS. They typically offer a less "raw" product with better ease of use and more specialization to a particular market. Examples include:

US: MediaTemple, Mosso;
UK: ElasticHosts, FlexiScale

[Thatcher_Michelsen]

I am using GoGrid I really like it, very powerful and simple no problems. For larger scale projects based on Linux try www.3Tera.com that is a very impressive cloud computing platform. enjoy. and checkout my GreenIT consulting services at www.wudata.com

[tragopan619]

Sounds like a neat product. Too bad it's ColoServe/ServePath, terrible sales practices. There billing and sales departments don't talk to each other. Promises made by sales staff isn't honored in the billing department. Worst 1yr contract I ever did.