Bill Boebel, CTO of Webmail.us, is a happy Rackspace customer. But he recently moved his backup system to Amazon. Jason Hoffman from Joyent asked what this means:
Is it a success for Amazon or a failure of Rackspace? Or both? Will Amazon's offering mature to the point where it would make sense to run everything there? Will Rackspace wise up and begin to offer comparable services? Will we begin to do Grid Peering relationships where say our users or Rackspace's users could have network access from our servers to Amazon's without incurring a bandwidth charge?
Bill's response was, there's more to Amazon Web Services than its hosting infrastructure.
Bill was unhappy with his previous backup solution NOT because it's hosted at Rackspace. Off-the-shelf backup systems just aren't very efficient for maildir, where file names change frequently (to track read/replied/flagged status), causing the same email message to be backed up multiple times. Bill wanted to write a homegrown backup system. He did so at Amazon rather than Rackspace because:
At S3, we were able to just develop the maildir backup logic and some data cleanup logic. We skipped developing the backup storage system altogether. We coded the storage client, not the storage server. Initially we had planned on building both. But when S3 came out our thoughts quickly shifted...
Bill concluded that:
We're always looking for ways to build new stuff faster. In some cases this will mean building on top of services hosted by other companies, such as Amazon. In other cases it will mean building on top of open source software and hosted it on servers at Rackspace.
So if you share Doug Erwin's ambition of winning and keeping 100% of each of your customers' hosting business, it's going to take more than the fastest hardware and the bestest service. You'd also have to match Amazon's Web Services Stack, as illustrated by Read/Write Web:
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