Vultr Cloud Alliance rises to take on cloud Goliaths

Cloud hosting provider Vultr (no relation) is spearheading an alliance of cloud companies aiming to offer a marketplace of services in order to better compete with the major cloud operators.

The Vultr Cloud Alliance is described as a strategic partnership between a network of partners, which will provide a catalog of solutions and services from which customers can build their cloud operations, using a single management portal.

Vultr told us that the intention of this new initiative is to provide customers with easy access to a broader range of cloud services, but also to offer an alternative to the hyperscale cloud companies that it claims lock customers into high service costs and complexity.

"Right now, the market is dominated by big tech clouds and we want to change that," said Vultr CMO Kevin Cochrane, adding that the aim was to "democratize access to the cloud" through more flexible infrastructure and services, to allow organizations to build and run applications in the ways that work best for them.

The Cloud Alliance gives companies an alternative that will let them build custom cloud operations from an ecosystem of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers, Vultr said – or at least that is the plan.

At launch, the Cloud Alliance comprises just a handful of companies; cloud storage specialist Backblaze, DevOps outfit Cloud 66, MLOps provider Domino Data Lab, and Console Connect, a Network as a Service (NaaS) company.

By sheer coincidence, these are all companies that have already announced or extended a strategic partnership with Vultr, making the Cloud Alliance look very much like it is essentially a Vultr-driven initiative to promote its own cloud platform, although the company said it plans to introduce further partners in future.

According to Vultr, customers will get access to a simple control panel that makes it easy to deploy infrastructure and add services from a single central portal. The control panel is hosted by Vultr, but Cochrane told us that it is Kubernetes-based and supports an API, allowing any provider to join the marketplace and make their services available through it.

We asked Vultr if the marketplace meant that customers will be able to mix and match services from different providers within the Cloud Alliance, and Cochrane told us that is the case.

"The marketplace means that customers benefit from plug-and-play services from our partners. For example, they can spin up Vultr Kubernetes Engine (VKE) clusters, then pick and choose pre-built container-based services to deploy in that cluster," he said.

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Readers will note that as the only current IaaS provider in the Cloud Alliance, this means that customers will be deploying those pre-built container-based services onto Vultr's cloud for now. The company does at least have a global footprint, with 32 datacenter locations in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

Vultr has the approval of one analyst, with IDC VP for Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services Dave McCarthy saying in a statement that "composability is at the core of this new partner ecosystem," and that "this empowers customers to optimize their cloud strategies by selecting the most suitable solutions to meet their specific needs, ultimately driving efficiency and growth."

Omdia chief analyst Roy Illsley told us that the value of this solution is that it appears to be aiming to be multi-cloud, but added that "the appeal of this would be greater if it included the hyperscalers and customers could switch cloud platform at no cost, so that if you run an app on cloud A you could swap to cloud B at no cost in terms of licensing and functionality."

As it stands, Illsley said he believed this initiative would appeal mostly to small-to-midsize companies, which already make up much of Vultr’s customer base.

Vultr said the Cloud Alliance is live and operational as of June 20, although an official launch of it and the marketplace will be held at a Vultr event in Miami on June 29. ®