The importance of ‘dogfooding’ in the cloud

The importance of ‘dogfooding’ in the cloud article from InfoWorld tells that Amazon.com runs entirely on AWS EC2 and Microsoft runs Office365, Skype, and XBox Live on Azure. But Google doesn’t run any of its products on GCP. Here’s why it matters.

The term “dogfooding” is used to describe companies using their own products. The idea is that by being a user, the company will find issues with products and improve their overall experience. Many software products are created out of their founders’ need for a better solution than already exists.The problem is, the further away a company gets from its customers, the more it loses out on the dogfooding effects.

The whole point of the cloud is that the services and infrastructure are run and managed by an expert third party: You trust them to keep the system running, optimize performance, and continually fix issues. This is important for SaaS but even more important for IaaS because companies rely on IaaS services as critical parts of their infrastructure.

One argument for running your own private infrastructure is that at least you have control and own the incentive to ensure it works!