Straight Crushing it

I want to talk about two companies, that are just straight killing it. Crushing it.

Nutanix is like if a country, that has won more gold medals than the rest of the world, had the largest military, sent a man to the moon, is the youngest kid on the block, and is straight taking it face to face with the largest empire ever created, because they don't want to pay taxes on a war they forced that country to be in.
I don't particularly have a lot of pride in America. But it’s hard to argue with results, and America has been straight crushes it for 200 years. Sure it was built off the backs of subjugated people. And having the ability to keep factories open, after bombing the shit out of the rest of the world. Then moving into the modern era by having more mathematicians on staff to just utterly dominate the information of the world and it's own people.
And Nutanix might be like that. I don't know, I don't really know much about the Nutanix culture or day-to-day affairs. I do know they offer great products, at prices more affordable, than VMware.
The Nutanix VMware rivalry is well documented.
And I wouldn't be raving about Nutanix if there wasn't a reason. The capabilities of Nutanix’s hardware blows everything out of the water. They offer a layer of hardware for SSD cache to alleviate the bottleneck that is IO.
Nutanix is eating VMware's lunch. VMware tried to silently creep in and be your only hypervisor, like some clandestine takeover of the data center. But Nutanix came to the door and said, "I'm better, and sometimes I'm even cheaper."
And why wouldn't you let them in. Nutanix is winning for the foreseeable future. Nutanix is more affordable. By all accounts Nutanix seems to be crazy good and has crazy resilient hardware.

Now to switch gears, paid hosting, the cloud...
The Cloud Saves money, we know this. Some of us don't understand how but it does, so I'll give you a brief intro. Once upon a time I worked at a small search engine. And we needed anywhere between 7 and 30 servers a day, depending on fluctuations. Clearly keeping that hardware on hand was not justifiable as it would typically be sitting dormant in a corner. Renting made fiscal sense and had the added benefit of moving the expense from Capex to Opex. Plus when you're in the cloud, for whatever reason, you just really find ways to squeeze the juice out of those servers. That's it. Economics lesson over.
Let's talk about Amazon. They're offering crazy innovations for goddamn pennies. Seriously look at the services Amazon is offering. Are you even trying other hosting companies? I checked...they aren't.
If brash Nutanix is America, then Amazon is Finland. Amazon's mature for a tech company, maybe not for a normal corporation, but practically old age for a tech company. Finland has the best education in the world, they score high on the happiness index, life is good. Okay, okay we heard some not so great things about their employees not having the best time not too long ago, fair enough. Finland's also practically Eastern Europe. I don't really know if there's actually anything wrong with Finland. I hear they drink a lot, but really that's the kind of quality that endears me to a nation. So whatever, just get past that. I'm pretty sure Amazon's engineers are happy. I mean you can't be straight disrupting the entire paradigm you’re working in, and not feel good. Look at the products Amazon put on the table....no really, fucking look...NO seriously, take a goddamn look. I'll wait:

https://aws.amazon.com/

But I want to talk about two services particularly and, they’re all fucking gems. I'm just choosing these two because they're on opposite ends of the spectrum. But they both do one crazy thing...they save you a fuckton of money.

Lamdba

Okay I'm going to offer you a service, where you just upload code, and you only pay for the compute you use. What do you think?
Are you kidding me with this shit, not only am I only paying for the compute I use, with the right Dev, I don't even need an infrastructure team. I just want to note as someone whose bread and butter is infrastructure, this was very rude of Amazon.

Machine Learning

Okay, so we’re just gonna go ahead and implement some advanced math algorithms for you...So your devs don't have to like know math and shit. Oh what do they do. THEY PREDICT THE GODDAMN FUTURE. But they're hard to implement, or they're something tricky right? No, just upload a CSV with accurate data about the past, and the better your data, the better the predictions. Alright, so what kind of price tag are you talking about on the magic robot that predicts the future? I mean that's got to be expensive right! Well I've used the magic robot, with ginormous CSV files. And it ran me about $4 USD (which I am totally good for Amazon, just having a little streak of unemployment, so that card is maxed out, but like un-suspend my account so I can get that sweet, sweet Alexis skill shirt, plz).
So who else in hosting/cloud has it together. Well let's look at Rackspace, they've got two decisions under their belt, that make them still worthwhile. In all fairness I used to work there and still have a certain fondness for them. Firstly they partnered with Amazon to offer a managed cloud product. And second, they eliminated services not core to their business (Cloud Sites), and they're buying themselves out of stock holder hands’...Presumably so they won't be beholden to stock holders and can be engaging in the kind of shit that Amazon's already doing.
And I have no more nice things to say about hosting so, if you work for some other hosting company, continue read on at your own peril. Companies like Linode, Digital Ocean, and Vultr can be great...for devs only. Or for doing a single box set up. Or even a few box set up. But some of these places you can't even virtualize on the boxes, so don't even think about ESXi, Xen, KVM, Docker, LXC, or any microservices. They all offer around the same comparable features, with maybe a $5 option extra...You know because who wants to spend $10 USD a month on the thing that runs your business…
Oh hey and did I mention that Amazon is straight up cheaper than these guys.
So to hosting companies everywhere I say, Get your shit together. Get all your shit, put it in a backpack, sell it at the shit store if you have to........
GET IT TOGETHER HOSTGATOR, FUCK.
It's like reading a goddamned Ayn Rand novel; everyone else is so comically far behind these guys, it seems like there lack of progress is a sure sign of malicious intent.
Amazon and Nutanix are primarily doing one thing that others aren't. They're innovating. They're taking risks in their fields and the features they offer are unique, and strangely enough cheaper than the alternatives. So everybody else, get it together already.

P.S. Nutanix, if you want to send me something for my home lab, that would be wicked awesome(Yeah, fucking right). No but seriously something to wrap around my torso would be great.

Join me next time, when I tell you what I really think of Microsoft.