Easy to understand Billing model
Make it easy to reason about the billing model, simpler than what is exposed to “pay per use”. I need to use it every day. It should just work without surprise. Do not expose the – “you looked at me – y $, you asked for that z$”. Please provide reliable API that I can utilize for creating SaaS applications.
Tell me about your maintenance cycles (please) –
For end customers using a solution, downtime communication is essential. Ideally 24*7 operation is required but we can craft a solution which can deliver minimum viable option at lower cost.
MultiTenancy
It means a documentDB/Aurora or Search should have ability to create “tiers” for free/shared instances where I can club in folks for my “freemium tier” without paying production amounts. As it is very low margin business let us find ways to make it simpler. This is little bit different from me creating a shard instance.
Support for MultiCloud Libraries/stacks
We need support for jcloud, fog, libcloud across Provisioning, monitoring, billing of all possible assets. We understand it will not be a odbc standard but something more workable. Provide deeper integration into chef/puppet/ansible/salt with better templating than promoting custom “provider models”. Thanks for integrating with github…push it as alternative to store assets. So that config (testing/deployment) etc everything is coded up and stored in github or something similar. Thanks for support for docker, coreos.
What azure is supported only for blobs in one of them somewhere(libcloud)? No powershell is awesome but not everyone’s favourite piping tool.
Win-Win
I bring you x $, you provide me 0.20%x. No really – make the partnership work with real people rather than english. Let us find a way to make the adoption faster. Help us unseat the existing partner brokers who are deadweight – whose deployment/AMC (people/cost) models are a challenge in pure cloud model. That air cover we talked about needs to be about partners, partners, partners. Help unlock the cio-tech-team ice. It is not about x% discounts on the platform. Focus on that annual sign up stuff for certain software licenses will not open door to growing pie.
Here is shout out to Vijay who joined MongoDB and he correctly points out “lack of lever” with both customer and seller – there is no complexity. http://andvijaysays.com/2014/03/25/are-we-there-yet-cant-wait-to-start-my-new-adventure/
In cloud based setup simplicity is much more stark.
Support
Real support in terms of what does not work rather than “green my scorecard” – so just use it(shove down my throat). Own up the support issues and help bring down my costs and increase your spread. Get folks who understand both business and technology(people outside use different from what you sell). Let us know at what is coming down which can potentially make us commodity. Be honest about it.
No unless I explicitly tell you don’t push a service. I will pick unique services based on their strength, honestly I will. Love completely hands off 99.99 % Sql Azure where I get backup, HA all in great price. Wished that infra was available for others to host stuff like DB.
Make it supportable
Other OS is as useful and widely deployed so tools for picking up monitoring information should become better. IIS is a great tool but so are nginx , apache and their friends ha-proxy, squid, varnish. Make “separation/divorce” easier. Easier to withdraw data, easier to withdraw configuration settings – UX should reflect what is possible through powershell, cli and at worst language specific rest bindings. Preferably a language which runs on all platforms.
Some place else 