Over the past several weeks we’ve looked at different aspects of the question of private vs public Cloud. We started with an overview. From there, we talked about pricing, security, and then management. Today we’ll take a look at how the two options compare in the areas of reliability and performance.
While Public Cloud solutions like Azure and AWS are near-ubiquitous, they are by no means too big to fail. You can read about some major Azure and AWS outages here, here, and here. For users of the Internet of Things (IoT), an AWS outage can mean not being able to control lights or a front gate as this user reported during the February 2017 AWS outage:
Thankfully for the users of our hosted SOLIDWORKS Cloud PDM solution, EpiGrid has never had an outage and is completely independent of Azure and AWS. The Cloud solution we offer through EpiGrid is completely Private to the point that we can actually point to the computer your data is hosted on rather than just giving you a time zone your data is most likely in.
Now let’s talk performance. One expectation for users of Cloud technology, especially engineers, is that it will perform better than their current solution. This is rather difficult to compare when dissecting Public vs. Private Cloud. However, if given the same set of criteria, i.e. distance from the host, identical data set, same network components, a Private Cloud solution should perform as good, and in most cases, better than a Public Cloud. You will by no means be sacrificing performance for the sake of the previously mentioned benefits.
However, measurable performance gains will be found in the way you work, and how these Cloud tools can enable the freedom to truly collaborate with vendors, contractors, third-party stakeholders, etc. And although the scope of this document is to examine private vs public Cloud infrastructures, it’s also worth noting that in most cases, any SOLIDWORKS Cloud solution will help boost work performance versus a traditional on-premise solution.
