Amazon Web Services has lost a nice piece of glory business to SoftLayer, the public cloud company IBM just paid an estimated $2 billion to buy reportedly for the pleasure of poking AWS in the eye.
Big Blue just got that distinct pleasure, heightened by the fact that it’s making a nice chunk of change off the deal.
Here’s what happened.
Amazon was supposed to host the first cloud-based DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC). The idea was for some of the world’s best engineers to develop their software in a virtual simulation, a challenge in itself, before getting to the actual robot phase of the competition.
Well, after initially using AWS, the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which runs the annual competition, ran into trouble with the speed of Amazon’s server communication. So it switched to SoftLayer’s bare metal platform, which was reportedly the only one it could find that could shorten communication loops between machines to 1k/second.
SoftLayer offered the power and speed needed, as well as the raw compute, without any extra virtualization.