Exploring alternatives to AWS: save costs and enhance performance

It is hard not to think of AWS when discussing cloud infrastructure. For many DevOps teams, the virtualized solutions offered by Amazon have been the building blocks of their work. Still, there are many reasons for you to consider AWS Alternatives.

Virtualized cloud computing is usually praised for its practicality. That said, imagine if you could find a platform that offers that same reassuring flexibility, but with the power of fully dedicated servers.

It may sound too good to be true, but Latitude.sh has figured that out. 

By the end of this article, you will understand how bare metal can take care of your workloads with the same level of automation you would only find in virtual environments while increasing your performance and decreasing your costs.

Why do so many companies rely on AWS?

Cloud computing had its roots in the 1960s when the concept of time-sharing began to take shape. 

This early model allowed multiple users to remotely access and share computational resources on mainframes, a revolutionary idea at the time. 

Fast-forward to the 2000s the industry saw a heavy shift from on-prem servers to cloud-based services in data centers worldwide, where businesses could access scalable resources without owning the hardware. 

AWS may not have been the first but it was one of the most important companies in increasing the reach of cloud computing, with a broad portfolio of solutions and a fairly easy-to-use experience when launched.

The need for secure, flexible infrastructure to support an ever more dispersed user base, drove an unprecedented demand for cloud solutions and Amazon had both the hardware and software to make that happen.

As AWS expanded even more the number of solutions in their portfolio, many clients centralized all their infra needs within the hyper scaler and became locked into their ecosystem, a perfect opportunity for Amazon to raise prices.

But if the costs are so much higher than other alternatives and the performance is usually worse, why do companies still rely on AWS for most of their digital infrastructure?

Aside from the operational challenges of overcoming their lock-in, some people lack the awareness of reliable alternatives and the ones who do know them, still need to better understand how such options can provide value to them. 

Private Cloud vs Public Cloud

The concept of virtualized computing has been around for decades, evolving alongside advancements in technology and networking. 

While virtualized cloud solutions remain popular, they are not without limitations. 

As businesses demand more control, security, and performance, bare metal servers' advantages become increasingly apparent compared to shared hosting. 

Dedicated servers eliminate many of the risks by offering single-tenant infrastructure without the overhead of virtualization. 

For businesses requiring consistent performance, enhanced security, and full control over their environments, bare metal servers are a far more powerful and reliable solution.

And if you think that means more complexity for you to handle your workload, think again.

Latitude.sh: Bringing a Cloud Experience to Bare Metal

Latitude.sh bridges the gap between the cloud's flexibility and bare metal’s raw power. 

Our platform offers fully dedicated instances, which means servers can only be used by a single tenant, ensuring the highest levels of security and performance while maintaining the user-friendly automation of virtualized environments.

Our core products at Latitude.sh include Metal, Accelerate, and Build. 

Metal provides multi-purpose, CPU-focused bare metal servers designed to support a wide range of workloads.

Accelerate offers high-performance GPU instances optimized for cutting-edge computing tasks, such as machine learning.

Lastly, Build is a personalized service that helps businesses create tailored infrastructure without the complexity of managing hardware.

Customers can deploy servers across various global locations and choose from pre-configured OS images or deploy custom ones. SSH keys can be used for password-less remote access while maintaining enhanced security. 

Flexible billing options are also available, allowing customers to choose between hourly and monthly billing for on-demand, or long-term contracts with progressive discounts.

Additionally, our platform allows you to deploy and manage your servers in multiple ways: you can use our super user-friendly dashboard, leverage the efficiency of our powerful APIs, or centralize all actions on your terminal with our command line interface.

A real example of how to benefit from AWS alternatives

It's easy to just talk about how AWS alternatives sound better in theory, but real-life examples will make it clearer. Let's take the Web3 segment, just for the sake of the argument. 

Neon Labs developed Neon EVM, an Ethereum Virtual Machine, to act as a proxy between Ethereum and Solana.

This innovation enables Ethereum users to benefit from Solana’s faster speed and lower costs without needing to rewrite their entire code. 

Juliano Souza, Cloud and DevOps Manager at Neon Labs, faced significant challenges hosting the company's instances at AWS.

He continually struggled with high costs and sub-optimal performance while running high-throughput workloads on AWS and GCP virtual machines, which made the operation more complex, slower, and more expensive.

After conducting extensive research and narrowing down multiple cloud options, he evaluated the pros, and cons of each and ultimately chose Latitude.sh for the platform’s functional benefits and Web3-friendly policies. 

With many user-friendly resources, like a powerful API, SDKs, and a Terraform provider, Juliano was able to perform a seamless transition, allowing him to carry out the full migration from the public cloud for many complex workloads in a matter of weeks.

The result was fantastic: an increase of three times in performance, all on top of a 60% reduction in cloud costs.

And this is just one among many more examples, like StudioSol and Algolia.

Three points to make it clear

Virtualized environments come with a performance bottleneck mostly due to the hypervisor overhead, which can slow down processing and negatively impact high-computing tasks.

This additional layer between the hardware and the application often leads to inefficiencies. 

Additionally, security risks are heightened in virtualized clouds because multiple tenants share physical resources, increasing the potential for vulnerabilities as attacks on other tenants will affect the same resources responsible for hosting your application.

Lastly, long-term costs can escalate quickly, particularly with heavy workloads. Data transfer fees, scaling, and egress traffic charges add up, making the solution more expensive over time.

In contrast, bare metal servers provide unmatched performance by giving direct access to all the physical hardware can offer, with no hypervisor to slow things down.

This makes them ideal for resource-intensive applications, regardless of the industry.

From a security perspective, bare metal offers a single-tenant environment, which means that your workloads are isolated from potential "noisy neighbors".

In terms of cost, bare metal servers from top-tier providers like Latitude.sh are an effective solution for businesses of all kinds, as they provide better rates for both on-demand and reserved instances, eliminate ingress fees, and greatly reduce the costs of egress.

You have probably already realized that you are looking at one of the best alternatives to the public cloud. Create an account for free today and start decreasing your AWS lock-in.