I find it very difficult to get numbers and stats about clouds. Sure, a cloud is just vapor in the real physics world, but when it comes to cloud computing, should we not be able to gather more precise information? What are customers doing, what providers are successful at.

Bringing the fog lights on

Of course we praise privacy at Exoscale, so do not expect names, brands and anything, but we feel like we can give some decent stats now that Open Cloud in this form is 1 year old.

horizontal scaling vs virtual private datacenter/cloud

Since 2011, Exoscale has offered 2 distinct cloud offerings:

• Open Cloud (reborn and renamed early last year) is a pure cloud computing service with maximum simplification, performance and automation in mind. Wherever we can get rid of old hardware bound paradigms we do.
• Managed Cloud brings the full datacenter experience, often called VPC or VDC, all in a self-service manner. This enables customers to get a first usage experience about cloud computing and pay as you go usage. I call it the hybrid trend, necessary and progressive path to IT from on-premises to more modular, scalable approach.

Flavors

Running stats on the infrastructure gives interesting metrics especially on the repartition of operating systems. Exoscale not only provides Linux instances but Windows as well and here are the stats:

• Linux: 75 %
• Windows: 25 %

Across the different flavors of each OS type we provide, there are clear preferred choices. I would guess different numbers if Exoscale was a US based service, with RPM based distribution preferred:

• Ubuntu: 74 %
• CentOS: 19 %
• Debian: 7 %

And on the Windows side, usage of newer versions is slow adopting:

• Windows Server 2008 R2: 53 %
• Windows Server 2012: 20 %
• Windows Server 2012 R2: 27 %

Pricing: “Me too”

Cloud pricing has hit the headlines recently, with announcements from all major providers. Of course we hate the me too effect, but we also had this in planning for long. So without further waiting and based on our innovation on infrastructure layers we are glad to publish the following price drops:

• Open Cloud Compute: - 25 % on all instance prices calculator

All these are applicable right from April 15th to all new and existing customers.

Managed Cloud also gets new discounts for longer time commitments of 24 to 36 months and volume as well.