It was not until 2010 that it really became clear that cloud computing was here to stay. However, as more enterprises began moving to cloud services, many realized that those services were far less utopian than had been assumed. EC2, for example, experienced significant outages, and many clients found costs were actually lower on more traditional platforms, despite utility billing.
SingleHop, an IaaS provider, is focusing on hybrid hosting solutions in interesting and unique ways. The company was ranked 25th fastest growing in the U.S. for 2010 according to Inc. Magazine, and now boasts over 10,000 servers in its two data centers.
The firm has taken a page from Threadless’ book by crowdsourcing the design of infrastructure solutions. Given the increased complexity of configuring modern computing environments with a mix of public and private clouds, not to mention load balancers, firewalls and related devices and services, SingleHop is looking to the community through its Infrastructure by Democracy program. Its LEAP3 platform is designed to facilitate the design, deployment and management of hybrid solutions. Through it, clients can browse different solutions, such as a “highly scalable sharepoint” solution, read and write reviews, participate in community discussions, and then deploy them with one click.
