Not the OP but we have had a hell of a time with SoftLayer and have been doing everything we can to move. If you have a large ops team (or a team that isn't busy) and you go with a well planned physical server build-out (make sure you get them in different pods) you _might_ be ok.
We have been working on a POC in AWS and it's such a breath of fresh air. Things work as advertised, the provisioning process is quick and everything can easily be done with an API call. No more waiting for support tickets. The freedom you get with your network routing in an AWS VPC is worth it to me.
At the risk of sounding too much like an AWS fanboy we are actually looking at scrapping it all and just bringing everything in-house running on our own physical boxes with some type of hypervisor on top.
> At the risk of sounding too much like an AWS fanboy we are actually looking at scrapping it all and just bringing everything in-house running on our own physical boxes with some type of hypervisor on top.
We have done just that, with Opennebula (qemu,kvm; networking built on top of openvswitch and storage from distributed iSCSI NAS appliances). It's a perfect middle ground. All the easy provisioning niceness, less than half the price of AWS.
We have been working on a POC in AWS and it's such a breath of fresh air. Things work as advertised, the provisioning process is quick and everything can easily be done with an API call. No more waiting for support tickets. The freedom you get with your network routing in an AWS VPC is worth it to me.
At the risk of sounding too much like an AWS fanboy we are actually looking at scrapping it all and just bringing everything in-house running on our own physical boxes with some type of hypervisor on top.