Dan's Take

Stratoscale Targets AWS-Focused Enterprises

But is it a good tool for hybrid clouds?

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 08/08/2017

Stratoscale Symphony is designed to replicate an Amazon Web Services (AWS) computing environment in an enterprise's own datacenter. Another company goal is helping users of VMware's tools move to an AWS-like computing environment.

AWS is the leading supplier of cloud-computing services, according to most IT industry research firms. Depending on the research firm, the revenue market share Amazon holds appears to range between 37 percent - 40 percent. While competitors such as Microsoft's Azure and Google Cloud Platform are growing, they have a long way to go to overtake AWS.

Stratoscale has developed software that replicates the functions of quite a number of AWS services, including the following services:

• EC2 – Virtual machine environment service
• EBS – Block storage service
• VPC – Virtual network connection service
• ECS – Kubernetes container environment service
• S3 – Storage service
• Cloud Formation – application templates
• RDS – Relational database service
• ELB – Load balancing service
• App Catalog – Marketplace for third-party applications and services

The company has plans to launch six more services in the second half of 2017.

The company wants to provide enterprises with a complete AWS-compatible computing environment that can be hosted in its own datacenters. This, the company says, would make it possible for developers to use a standard set of tools which would serve to decrease development time; improve overall application reliability and quality; reduce the overall cost of development; and make it possible for enterprises to reduce or eliminate lock-in.

Dan's Take: A Strong Contender for AWS Shops
I'm a strong believer in starting with a standard architecture that allows enterprises to build and deploy a computing environment with an eye to being able to use new technology in the form of new systems, new storage, new networking and so on, while still being able to work in a consistent development and deployment environment. The ever-growing array of cloud services, each having its own set of services and tools, makes it somewhat difficult for enterprises to move workloads into and out of these cloud service offerings.

Stratoscale has selected AWS as a model and implemented a set of tools that could be useful to enterprises committed to AWS as a platform. The company's plans for new services shows that it's keeping its finger on the pulse of the industry and making services to support Big Data, analytics, open transactional systems and so on, supportable within both its own computing environment and Amazon's.

Stratoscale isn't the first company to do this. Eucalyptus offered a similar set of services and presented similar messages. Back in 2014, HP (now HPE) acquired Eucalyptus, which signaled a change in that company's cloud strategy. Although I'm sure that HPE continues to support this technology, it has gotten lost among all of HPE's other software products.

If AWS is a major component of your company's cloud strategy, it would be wise to know about Stratoscale's offerings.