Softlayer hops into Equinix's Cloud Exchange

IBM's cloudy concern SoftLayer has decided it'll be better off if it joins Equinix's Cloud Exchange.

Cloud Exchange is a service that provides nicely groomed links between users of cloud computing providers and their chosen clouds. The service is valuable because as organisations put more important workloads and data into public clouds, or adopt hybrid cloud, they find it's useful to have a predictable connection to their chosen provider of evaporative computing.

Arranging such connections with a telco is possible, but pricey. Cloud Exchange offers a half-way house, by taking traffic on a fast-track from Equinix bit barns to Azure, AWS, Google's cloudy efforts and, as of today, SoftLayer. Equinix's service is also elastic: if you need a fatter pipe to your cloud of choice you can dial it up as required.

Equinix is puffing out its chest about now offering a nice way to reach the top four public cloud players. IBM is spinning this as an additional – and rather nice – enhancement to SoftLayer.

And you? Cloud computing has often been spun as a friction-and-commitment-free way to do computing. That the biggest four public clouds all feel the need to work with Equinix is another sign, as if it were needed, that real work in the cloud isn't as simple as slapping down a credit card and consuming some CPU cycles. ®