At American Cloud, we support sustainable innovations that allow everyone from an MNC to the small business next door to harness the power of cloud technology equally. Our mission towards building a better and more transparent cloud services platform began with a bleak yet significant realization - the internet is no longer what it used to be!
When it was first introduced in 2006, cloud computing was a revolutionary technology for businesses worldwide. For the first time in the history of the internet, businesses from all over the globe had access to cutting-edge data computing and storage resources managed by some of the world’s best tech companies. The adoption of cloud-based technology has grown exponentially since. What was once a luxury is now the norm, with 84% of all mid-to-large-sized global businesses having multi-cloud strategies in place.
Curiously, however, the number of major cloud service providers in the game has more or less remained stagnant. As American Cloud CEO and co-founder Aron Wagner puts it, "Cloud computing has seen a tragic shift from being a utility-based solution to a mass-produced product that doesn't quite help anyone". For Wagner and co-founder Dane Nakamura, this represents a rot in the global cloud services industry as we know it.
The same four Big Tech companies have been managing the world’s cloud systems for over a decade now. Naturally, there is little room for flexibility, innovation, or customization in such a cornered and lop-sided market. This was the solemn understanding that inspired Wagner and Nakamura to focus their efforts on finding viable solutions that would rejuvenate the cloud services space.
The American Cloud Renaissance
Wagner and Nakamura’s idea was simple yet pioneering. Together, the duo set out to build a full-fledged cloud services platform that was not just independent of Big Tech servers, but also significantly more flexible and affordable.
“We needed to build a cloud provider that was going to be industry agnostic and truly a utility for people to harness the power of the cloud,” says Nakamura. “At American Cloud, our value is in our ability to use our own facilities, power, gear, and engineering to make cloud computing services easy to access and use,” he goes on to add.
Today, American Cloud soldiers on as one of the very few independent cloud service providers that are truly committed to serving each client holistically. Their most radical disruption of the traditional cloud infrastructure is the use of open-source technology to build the underlying framework of the platform. What does this achieve? Open-source technology is free for anyone on the internet to access, download, and adapt to their own projects. That means the foundations of American Cloud’s design and infrastructure are available for anyone to access on the internet.
“All we’re selling is the convenience of having it configured and managed by a team of experienced industry professionals,” Wagner explains.
“All the underlying technologies we use are reliable, open-source frameworks that our team has been working with for a long time. We've built them resiliently, and there's no reason that a customer or somebody else couldn't build something very similar. They can create a hybrid cloud strategy, or bring the infrastructure back in house if that's the decision they want to make. It just comes down to the fact that clients want the ease of use and do not need to worry about managing all of the backend infrastructure aspects of a cloud,” he adds.
At American Cloud, our value lies in our ability to manage the facility, the power, the connectivity, the procurement of the servers and virtualization of them. We do so using the best, most reliable and robust open source frameworks that we believe in.
Building The American Cloud Way
When it came to designing our infrastructure for core services, there were several IaaS open source projects available to us. As Wagner explains, “We had a lot of options to choose from. There was the vastly popular OpenStack Project, the newer contender OpenNebula, and some others like Vanillastack.” What might have made complete sense to another company just didn’t sit well with us at American Cloud.
“The OpenStack Project seems cool on face value. However, the truth is that it’s extremely unmanageable because all of these different modules don't quite gel well together. With openstack, if you decide on a specific module, you can develop and maintain that well but it takes teams of teams to do so. Plus, it doesn't scale out horizontally well to additional sites.” Nakamura adds. This means that the OpenStack Project, while a good choice for some enterprises internally, it does not bode well to be the underpinning of a product used for many different use cases.
“Different vendors that have contributed to the OpenStack Project try to rope customers into some sort of support contract. That didn't line up with our mission to provide affordable scalable and reliable solutions.” Wagner says.
Instead, we chose to opt for a more reliable, flexible, and most of all, manageable option. “Apache Cloudstack differentiates itself in the field because it's an extremely reliable project. It’s highly available, offers multi-tenancy, and is scalable and purely API-driven. It’s perfect as far as accessibility and ease of use is concerned.” adds Wagner.
Apache Cloudstack is one of the four key open-source projects that underpin the orchestration of our customer’s infrastructure at American Cloud. We utilize,
- Apache Cloudstack - for a robust cloud infrastructure
- Ceph - for a resilient distributed storage
- PDNS - for reliable authoritative DNS
- Zabbix - to enable our auto scale feature on load balancers and show monitoring graphics for Virtual Machines
American Cloud’s high availability and accessibility continues to be its biggest strengths. Our ‘customer-first’ philosophy is what fuels the success and popularity that we have been able to garner so far. “We've listened to our current customers. We take their issues to heart and we want to keep making the American Cloud the cloud that truly works for them.”
What Sets American Cloud Apart
All operations at American Cloud are supported by tireless innovation and a commitment to providing customers with exactly what they need - a tailor-made cloud for their business that takes into account its unique challenges and goals. Here’s what sets us apart from the rest of the market,
Flexibility
A major issue that cloud solution users face is that most solutions are mass-produced for worldwide markets. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, for businesses to find services that can be customized to meet their specific needs. Sure, Amazon offers cloud packages that can be tailored to suit a business's requirements, but the process can be eminently challenging and time-consuming. That defeats the entire purpose of using a cloud service provider to handle data computing and storage, which is to make things easier for businesses.
At America Cloud, we craft 100% customizable and flexible solutions that can be configured according to your business and its cloud goals.
Adaptability
American Cloud is structured in a way that makes innovative decision-making and development easier. Our teams don’t have to wait for approval from a long chain of executives who have their own motivations and incentives when it comes to running the business. We believe the only way to do good business is to make a cutting-edge product that can keep up with changing times. American Cloud is capable of responding to market changes quickly without having to navigate the bureaucracy and decision-making processes of a large corporation.
Affordability
Our pricing plans reflect the values we believe in, which is that the latest technology should be accessible to every business around the globe, regardless of its size. "One of the biggest benefits I see us providing right out of the gate is that we're not charging network egress fees. It's a fixed cost for us and a fixed cost for our customers. That means customers don't have to worry about some crazy usage hike on their bill at the end of the month,” Wagner clarifies.
Portability
We take special efforts to ensure that the technology and data provided to clients remains portable. This is to encourage businesses to take full ownership of their environments and their data and to use their decision making processes to decide where they’d like to store it.
Our Company Philosophy
American Cloud's business philosophy is centered around a commitment to upholding the core values of the internet: transparency, accessibility, and democratization. We believe the internet was built on these American values, so we work hard to ensure they continue to be the driving force behind the online world. Our cloud computing services are designed to be affordable and accessible to businesses of all sizes, helping to level the playing field and spark innovation and competition.
By offering better pricing than Big Tech companies, American Cloud is helping to make cloud computing more accessible and affordable for everyone. Whether you're a small business owner or manage a large corporation, American Cloud is committed to providing high-quality cloud computing services that are reliable, secure, and affordable.
When we talk about engineering in the open for American cloud, I think it's important for the American cloud community and the infrastructure and cloud community to know as a whole that American Cloud is not some proprietary based system that is intending to lock customers data in at the at the end of the day, customers data and your data belongs to you.