A couple of months back, I wrote a small article about the Skali Cloud and how I liked the niche approach they took to cloud computing. Skali offers a very unique ultra-scalable instances that can be attached to physical machines of variable performances and storage space. In normal English, that just means you can actually the processor speed, amount of RAM and even storage space of your machine (ok that wasn’t ’normal’ English).

In contrast, Amazon and every other cloud offering I know of, offer a specific number of machine types (usually 3 to 8) that come in fixed configurations with respect to processor speed, RAM and storage. The great thing about Skali is that if you have certain applications that would require high processing speed with minimum RAM, you can literally create a physical machine that fit your needs exactly. If you used Amazon for example, you’d have to acquire very large instance types on Amazon and usually pay a high premium for storage and memory that you really don’t need. Similarly for applications that don’t require high processing speed, but high amounts of memory instead could equally benefit from creating highly customized virtual machines to suit your performance needs.

A couple of weeks back, a commenter on my Skali cloud post and thanked me for the post, that commenter turned out to be Tengku Farith, the founder of Skali. So I wrote back requesting a small trial setup, and within a few days I manage to setup a trial account with Rm200 credit on the Skali cloud. (pretty awesome!) So I manage to wriggle a couple of hours to spend time toying around with the Skali cloud and here’s what I found:

After doing some research on Malaysian Cloud offerings particularly the IaaS offerings, I noticed something rather interesting from Skali. Now I always remembered Skali as an early web startup some time back in the 90s trying to ride the internet wave but failing all along the way, this however has some promise.

Skali takes cloud scalability to a whole different level with their cloud offerings, unlike other IaaS providers who offer a fixed number of machine types Skali offers a fully scalable machine that you can add processing power, Memory and Disk independently. In essence near unlimited amounts of options in terms of machine type compared to just 3 from Maxis Cloud.

The pricing still seems high, but it can go toe-to-toe with Maxis although it would depend on the specific requirements. From just the high level you can sense that these IaaS providers are going to compete for Malaysian customers but they’re competing with very niche offerings. Maxis ace up it’s sleeve would be the unlimited data transfer, which Skali charges at a mind-blowing Rm2/GB. Skali on the other hand offers an entire range of machine types (possibly in the hundreds), while Maxis offers just 3.

The choice between Maxis or Skali would be a simple one that would come down to how much data transfer or scalability you need in your application. That being said, let’s take a look at some other offerings from Skali Cloud.