I have spent the last four years working with cloud infrastructure. My employer has no critical servers in house.
We use a lot of cloud services. They vary in their characteristics. What we want from them:
- A pricing model that scales with our success and allows for spikey traffic.
- A stable interface. If you want to change something make it backwards compatable or give us notice of change.
- Have a status page similar to status.io that is accurately updated.
- Respond to support requests in hours not days.
- Use webhooks rather than emails to announce outages, maintenance windows and upgrades.
- We need to use an api to deploy or configure your service.
- We need an api to reconcile any billing transactions with payments.
- We will have multiple environments (qa, perf, staging, live) and only expect full price and support on live and perf.
Currently we deal with around a dozen suppliers and none of them provide all of the above.
Developer Rants 