Today, almost every service now is offered in a “Cloud” variant. But what does that really mean? Are all clouds services equal?
It’s easy to see why so many vendors rush to add a Cloud edition/variant of established software they sell. Undoubtedly, there has been a move to Cloud services across the industry, as more and more organizations seek to take advantage of the higher reliability and lower total cost of ownership that Cloud platforms promise.
The thing to watch out for is the major difference between Cloud Hosted and Cloud-Native.
When Cloud providers started to emerge; spearheaded by AWS who saw the opportunity to monetise the tooling and spare capacity they had in their data centres. We began to see other vendors jump to offer their software (which had previously been sold for on-prem use) on these Cloud platforms, hoping to capitalize on the emerging trend.
A lot of “enterprise” software was never designed to run on a Cloud platform. It was never architected to take advantage of the paradigm shift that cloud computing enables, and you are left with effectively paying (a premium, in some cases) for the same software, just running on a virtual machine on a Cloud platform. This is Cloud hosted. A self-contained software solution, typically cannot take advantage of what the Cloud offers - for instance, how would it know to load balance requests? Or scale up. Most of the time, it is limited by the resources it has to hand. The fixed cpu and memory it has been allocated.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have software that has Cloud built into its DNA. Software that relies on features that are only possible on Cloud platforms in order to work as it does - think fully distributed workloads, fault tolerance, and scaling for global performance.
Every superhero has an origin story. This is ours.
Cloudsmith is designed from the ground up as a Cloud-Native application. From day one, it has been architected to take advantage of all the technology that Cloud provider platforms offer.
This is why we don’t offer Cloudsmith in an on-prem variant. It’s not just a package management solution, it’s a secure, ultra-fast delivery platform for software, harnessing the power and flexibility of the Cloud and Edge computing.
It’s a smart CDN for software.
