Starting a new chapter in my career at Webscale has been energizing. Like many in the industry, I’ve spent years in the trenches with AWS, most recently helping to build out a managed services practice that extended AWS capabilities for customers. Those experiences gave me a front-row seat to both the power of cloud platforms and the challenges organizations face when trying to harness them effectively.
What I’ve discovered at Webscale in my first weeks here is eye-opening: this platform doesn’t just give businesses the raw materials of cloud computing, it delivers outcomes that go above and beyond what hyperscalers like AWS provide out of the box.
The AWS Era: Building Blocks and Burden
When I worked on AWS-centric solutions, the pattern was always the same:
- Customers got incredible flexibility from EC2, S3, RDS, CloudFront, and more.
- But realizing that value required custom engineering including configuring autoscaling groups, bolting on third-party security tools, wiring up monitoring and alerting, and providing 24/7 operational support.
- To close the gap, we developed managed services around AWS, helping customers run their workloads reliably while offloading some of that complexity.
It worked, but it was always a heavy lift. The hyperscalers gave us tools; we had to supply the glue.
Enter Webscale: A Platform Above the Cloud
What excites me about Webscale is how it eliminates so much of that undifferentiated heavy lifting. Here’s how:
- Intelligent traffic management: Webscale sits in the data path, making real-time decisions about routing, caching, and scaling. You don’t have to engineer those responses manually.
- Granular autoscaling: Instead of configuring AWS scaling groups and hoping they kick in on time, Webscale dynamically adds resources down to the container level during sudden surges, whether it’s a flash sale or a holiday peak.
- Security built in, not bolted on: A WAF, DDoS mitigation, and policy engine are native to the platform, not separate services you must stitch together.
- Unified visibility: One pane of glass for performance, security, scaling, and operations versus juggling multiple AWS consoles and dashboards.
- True partnership: With Webscale’s managed services, customers don’t just get infrastructure, they get a team that proactively monitors, optimizes, and responds like an extension of their own staff.
Real-World Scenarios That Resonate
Here are a few examples that stood out to me as I learned the platform:
- Flash sales and seasonal peaks: On AWS, you might pre-provision capacity or hope autoscaling policies kick in. With Webscale, scaling happens in seconds, down to individual PHP-FPM containers. No lag, no cold starts, no guesswork.
- Security incidents: Instead of piecing together AWS WAF, Shield, GuardDuty, and third-party tools, Webscale enforces policies directly in the traffic path, blocking threats before they ever reach your application.
- Migration to a distributed architecture: Moving from a monolith to headless commerce or microservices on AWS requires significant custom orchestration. Webscale’s templated, yet customizable architecture, makes the transition to independently scalable microservices smoother.
The Outcomes Backed by Proof Points
- 99.98% uptime delivered across commerce customers.
- Up to 32% faster page loads with built-in caching and routing optimization.
- Incident resolution in under 15 minutes on average, thanks to proactive managed services.
- Advanced security and bot mitigation: Webscale filters malicious and automated traffic at the edge. This has a dual impact:
- Defense: attackers, scrapers, and malicious bots are stopped before they reach your application.
- Attribution clarity: by removing “bad traffic,” the data left behind is clean and accurate, giving marketing and sales teams more reliable attribution and conversion metrics.
Those aren’t marketing claims, they’re measurable outcomes that matter directly to business leaders and technical teams.
Architecture at a Glance
When I explain Webscale to technical peers, I use this framing:
- AWS gives you building blocks: EC2, S3, CloudFront, RDS, Auto Scaling Groups. Each service is powerful, but it’s your job to integrate, monitor, and secure them.
- Webscale adds a unified control plane and intelligent data path on top of the cloud provider. It orchestrates scaling, routing, security, and performance automatically while a managed services team ensures it all runs reliably.
It’s not, with a smarter, commerce-optimized layer sitting above the raw infrastructure.
“Can’t We Just Build This Ourselves?”
This is the most common objection I hear from technical buyers. And the truth is: yes, you can replicate many of Webscale’s capabilities on AWS with enough engineers, time, and budget.
But here’s the tradeoff:
- You’ll need multiple specialists (DevOps, SecOps, performance engineers).
- You’ll spend hundreds of hours/month maintaining integrations and responding to incidents.
- You’ll stitch together third-party tools to fill the gaps.
Or, you can leverage Webscale’s platform and managed services to get those outcomes on day one, freeing your engineers to build features that drive revenue instead of plumbing.
My Takeaway as a New Sales Leader
Having helped build AWS-based managed services before, I can confidently say Webscale is different. It’s not just “hosting on AWS plus some support.” It’s a purpose-built platform that takes the promise of the cloud and raises it to a new level, delivering performance, resilience, and peace of mind that most organizations struggle to create on their own.
That’s why I’m excited to be here: helping more businesses see that they don’t need to settle for raw cloud resources when they can have a partner like Webscale powering their growth.
Want to See the Difference?
If you’re curious how your current AWS setup compares, let’s talk. We can walk you through where Webscale plugs into your stack, benchmark your infrastructure, and show you what “above the cloud” really looks like.
