At SiliconANGLE, one of the lesser publicized benefits for membership we have here is that we offer cloud-based blog hosting on our custom infrastructure (powered by our partner Rackspace, of course).  It’s something we’ve been testing to great success in private alpha for close to six months now, and it’s become an easier and easier pitch as interest in the cloud has grown in the last several months.

Still, it’s difficult to get folks to move what they view as mission critical operations to what can seem like foreign deployment environments, and wrapping your head around cloud services at the IT level can be pretty foreign.  A lot of the confusion around what it takes to deploy on the cloud has been fueled by the Amazon EC2 “hands-off” approach.  One of the hardest things about selling the benefits of the cloud is that it’s not always obvious why it’s a better solution when many other options are just good enough.

When I first investigated what it would take to deploy my employer’s blog on Amazon infrastructure in 2008, I was overwhelmed by the learning curve, and underwhelmed by the support Amazon offered to make this happen. It was obvious that we’d be better off in a cloud and an “as-needed” billing situation, since we were being raked over the coals in that department, constantly being upgraded in service level, yet still being faced with monstrous overage charges every month.

An exponentially growing website is only one example where the benefits of the cloud are clear.  Yesterday afternoon I spoke to another such example: Jeff Malkin, COO of Encoding. Encoding is an “on-demand” video encoding service that had previously been built on the AWS infrastructure, and the type of service that I’ve always seen to need more cloud utilization. The need for such a service to be on the cloud is pretty clear, at least to me – demand for a service like that can (and does) wildly fluctuate, and can spike due to any number of influencing factors.

They’ve recently made the transition off AWS to the Rackspace cloud, but the journey as to how they got there was most interesting to me.

“We had just enacted service-level-agreements as part of our standard service,” Malkin told me. “So we were on the hook for whatever failings our infrastructure experienced. So, the legendary ‘fanatical support’ was definitely a draw to Rackspace away from where we were.”

They didn’t simply stop at the support, though – at great volume, obviously small differences in price can mean great differences in profit margin.  To make sure that Rackspace not only provided a price benefit but the requisite level of computing juice they required, Encoding took advantage of independent research to really benchmark the system for them.

“Rackspace Offers Twice Power the Computing for the Price…”

Bitsource published the results on their blog, and if you’re technically inclined, it’s definitely interesting reading. They focused on two testing areas – throughput and disk I/O tests and tests on CPU power. The net takeaway on performance is that Rackspace and AWS seem to perform neck-and-neck in many areas (though there were some instances of breakout stats where Rackspace really shined in performance against AWS, and one or two instances where AWS really failed hard where Rackspace seemed to chug along smoothly).

What’s most interesting, at least from where I sit, is the price versus performance comparisons they ran.  Since in a cloud environment, the user is charged incrementally based on services used, it’s a service level that’s uniquely quantifiable and relatable to those beyond the just the IT crowd.

The graph here shows the money required to run though the benchmark they used to test the CPU power, a Linux kernel compile. As you can see, their tests show that in almost all cases, the Rackspace Cloud Services (on the graph as “CS”) outperformed AWS (on the graph as “EC2”) in terms of economy.

This was the nail in the coffin that showed Encoding that they needed to shift their focus and move over most of their operations to Rackspace servers – and indeed should be a good impetus for a great many folks to make the switch.  Almost all use cases would typically under the instances represented by the left two thirds of graph, and that was what Encoding found to be true for them as well.

[Editor’s Note: The Rackspace Cloud is a sponsor of SiliconANGLE. –mrh]