February 18, 2013, 7:06 AM — Amazon Web Services, seen by many as the market-leading infrastructure cloud computing provider, has a pretty full shelf of virtual machine (VM) image sizes for customers to spin up in its cloud -- 17 separate instance VM sizes are listed on the company's website, in fact.
But a growing trend among some smaller cloud providers allows customers to create their own virtual machine sizes, specified by however much RAM, CPU and memory they want. In an increasingly busy market, vendors, particularly smaller ones, are looking to differentiate themselves from the mega-players -- like the Amazons, Googles and HPs of the world -- and this is one way to do it.
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"You're pretty much talking about the biggest advantage we bring to the table," says Michael Higgins, chief enterprise solutions officer for European-based IaaS cloud provider CloudSigma, which also offers its services in the U.S. "If you are a high CPU user you won't have to purchase bundled RAM which you don't need!" the CloudSigma site explains. "If you need a lot of storage but less CPU and RAM likewise no problem. There are no 'standard' server size on the CloudSigma cloud."
