The news about Netflix, published last week by the Wall Street Journal, may have raised a few eyebrows: the king of streaming is looking to cut costs, including reducing its bill with its longtime cloud computing partner AWS. Sometimes we forget that even large companies are required to exercise fiscal responsibility.
Although it’s not clear how and if Netflix will reduce its expenditures vis a vis AWS, new cloud computing architectures are now available — for Netflix and other large providers of content and data — that are able to maximize efficiency and reduce cloud spending. But for that companies will need to look just a little beyond the public cloud: After more than a decade in which cloud computing was synonymous with large public cloud infrastructure, many businesses are now discovering that one size does not fit all.
While the hyperscale public cloud model has been an attractive proposition for a large number of customers, there are many use cases and business models — built upon private data centers and local public data centers — that can be a better fit. For whatever the need, a distributed cloud architecture, such as that offered by Ridge, is an alternative that can both improve cloud operations and reduce budgets. In this architecture, existing local data center and on-premises capacity in thousands of locations across the globe is leveraged to run cloud workloads to satisfy specific locality and peak time requirements.
It’s true that the existing large public cloud can provide economies of scale, but the distributed cloud model offers economies of locality and distribution. It enables enterprises to utilize a global network of service providers instead of relying on the availability of computing resources in a specific location. For Netflix, and others that want to control their cloud costs, the distributed cloud is an innovation that enables them to easily customize a cloud that fits their needs.
