Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Cloud Deployment Options
The cloud servicing industry might be in its nascent stage, but nonetheless there are already
some impressive options available from the industry. We will now briefly discuss some of
these popular options.
Environment Provisioning
Provisioning a cloud environment and maintaining operability requires answering multiple
questions and making informed choices. Apart from selecting the cloud service provider,
other aspects have to be taken into astute consideration. Some of the most important aspects
include the service provider API, compatibility with applications that need to be migrated,
and update scheduling.
In the following sections, we provide an introduction to such issues for the three most
popular cloud service providers. Please note that we will not include discussions and com-
parison based on pricing and some of the vendor specifications because these evolve quickly
based on the targeted business and customers.
Windows Azure
Microsoft's Windows Azure provides a Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud service model.
The vendor provides the infrastructure (compute resources, network, and storage) and
application development platform, including the OS, database, and web server (IIS). The
idea is to have the customer deal with only the application and its issues and remain
oblivious to all other platform-specific issues.
Being a Microsoft product, it offers integration with other Microsoft Live tools. Azure
works best for enterprise applications designed with service-oriented architecture (SOA) in
mind and provides automatic scaling. It also works well for medium-sized mobile apps.
Azure has two approaches to storage: SQL Azure Database (SAD) and Azure Storage.
SAD is a relational database, whereas Azure Storage is a nonrelational storage offering.
The biggest plus is the compatibility offered during migration from enterprise SQL Server
systems to SAD. The cost model is pay per use. The downside is the scalability and database
size (hundreds of GBs). Also, the import/export functionality does not guarantee consistency
until combined with a live database copy.
Amazon EC2
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is based on the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
cloud service model. Amazon provides the network, storage, and compute resources and
lets the customer take care of everything but the hardware. The customer, thus, is in com-
plete control of the whole environment. EC2 is the most popular cloud service brand in the
world because it gives its customers the ability to build their own custom stack from the
ground up, operate/maintain it the way they want, upgrade it the way they want, and scale
it the way they want. The amount of flexibility is unparalleled.
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