Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Give me the number again of where you would say the flip happens from a public cloud to a hybrid cloud.Emil Sayegh: The flip is starting to happen as companies that started in the cloud are looking at their bills now and they’re seeing the exorbitant prices. I think there’re a couple examples. One of them is Target.com. They were with AWS. There’re a lot of public stories as to why they moved. There’s Moz. You may have read some of the publicity here in the last two months where they left AWS for pricing reasons.This is the analogy I always give and it works. Essentially, if you have a constant workload for your application or even a workload that varies but in a rational or measured way between day to day and month to month, putting all your applications in the cloud is like living 365 days a year, 24 hours a day in a hotel. Sure, living in a hotel is convenient and you can scale up very quickly by adding more guest rooms if your family and friends started to show up. That’s not a way to live your life. It’s not that private. It’s expensive.Sramana Mitra: So the main reason the flip is happening is that the price of hybrid cloud for really high workload, as companies scale, is much higher than what it would be in a hybrid environment?Emil Sayegh: Exactly. With pure cloud, the price is much higher than it would be with a hybrid environment because hybrid environment allows you to offload your constant workloads on to dedicated servers. If you get a similar instance between dedicated servers and an Amazon Cloud Service, which have exactly the same specs, and you run them both for one month continuously, you’re going to pay three times more on AWS than on a dedicated server. For those workloads that are constant, on a hybrid cloud you can easily put it on a dedicated server while you leave your variable workloads on cloud.Sramana Mitra: Can we talk about a different use case? Let’s talk about publishing. Do you have customers that are in publishing?Emil Sayegh: We have customers throughout all the spectrum.Sramana Mitra: With publishing, the customer behavior is a little bit different. Online video is a big trend. With a publisher that has enough video content with millions of people accessing that video content, what does the infrastructure requirement look like there?Emil Sayegh: One of our big customers is one of the big networks. What they have on our array of servers is a whole bunch of videos for their affiliates. All the videos that their affiliates show on their affiliate websites are all served up on servers that are at Codero. That’s one of the examples. Those guys are using dedicated servers and not cloud because of performance consideration. You have to render that video. That takes a lot of processing power. They are using an array of dedicated servers and then the front-end interface of each one of the customized web interfaces to their affiliates is put on cloud. But the hardcore data storage and data rendering is all done on an array of dedicated servers on a hybrid type of structure.