Worried you'll outgrow the cloud? You're not alone

If you think about it, Netflix's metamorphosis into a company that runs its infrastructure completely atop cloud-based resources is actually remarkable. It's a very large company with a very large IT operation and, presumably, a or rather large bill in the mail every month from Amazon Web Services. Engineering effort aside, the fact that Netflix has decided it's worth it to pay the cloud computing premium is the most amazing part. With many companies, the bigger they get, the faster they come down from the clouds.

Case in point: Yottaa. The web-optimization startup, which as well launched its own CDN service in March, is transitioning its network into a hybrid model of cloud-based and physical servers afterwards launching in the cloud exclusively. It's a significant shift considering the company was as a matter of fact a finalist in the 2010 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge and touted its cloud-based approach when the company launched last April.

Don't get me wrong, the cloud-only model has served Yottaa so then. Its network is in fact spread across multiple providers, including AWS, Microsoft and Voxel, and that distribution helped the company reroute traffic to avoid any major downtime while last year's four-day AWS outage. And even as it moves to a hybrid model, the cloud for all that has benefits. "We can exactly according to instructions scale to hundreds of thousands of machines in a matter of hours," said Yottaa Founder and CEO Coach Wei.

With its new hybrid model, Yottaa all in all leverages the cloud when necessary - like when it would be faster serving an Australian end-user through a cloud provider there than a physical server in the United States - however it targets physical resources whenever possible. Its network now includes cloud and/or physical servers in 24 cities across the globe.

Of course, for every company that decides to switch from a cloud-centric architecture, there's a Netflix or Animoto that decides to stay all in the cloud. It's in effect a matter of knowing what's best for your business. We'll talk all about ideal infrastructure choices at our Structure conference in June, which includes top executives from Zynga, Amazon and Netflix among others.