Selecting a Service Platform - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 52

anywhere, it will be accessed from anywhere, including mobile devices. This affects archi-
tecture and security decisions.
Makeiteasyforcustomerstogetstartedusingyourservice.Ratherthanhavingtospeak
with a salesperson to sign up, signing up should be possible via the web site, possibly re-
quiringsubmissionofacreditcardorotherpaymentinformation.Facebookwouldnothave
gotten to where it is today if each user had to first speak to a customer service representat-
ive and arrange for an account to be created. Importing data and enabling features should
also be self-service. A product like Salesforce.com would not have been able to grow at
therateithasifimportingdataorotheroperationsrequiredworkingwithcustomersupport
personnel.
Itisalsoimportantthatpeoplecanleavetheserviceinaself-servicemanner.Thismeans
users should be able to export or retrieve their data and close their accounts, even if this
makes iteasier toleave andmovetoacompetitor.Customers will beconcerned abouttheir
ability to migrate out of the application at the end of the contract or if they are dissatisfied.
We believe it is unethical to lock people into a product by making it impossible or difficult
to export their data. This practice, called vendor lock-in, should be considered a “red flag”
thattheproductisnottrustworthy.Thebestwaytodemonstrateconfidenceinyourproduct
is to make it easy to leave. It also makes it easy for users to back up their data.
Many SaaS offerings are upgraded frequently, often without warning, providing little
opportunity for training. Users should be able to access major new releases for the purpose
of planning, training, and user acceptance testing. Provide a mechanism for users to select
the day they will be moved to major releases, or provide two tracks: a “rapid release” track
forcustomersthatwantnewfeatureswithoutdelayanda“scheduledrelease”trackforcus-
tomersthatwouldlikenewfeaturestoappearonapublishedschedule,perhapstwotothree
weeks after the rapid release track.
Finally, conflicts may exist between your data privacy and application hosting policies
and those of your customers. Your privacy policy will need to be a superset of all your
customers' privacy policies. You may need to provide heightened security for certain cus-
tomers, possibly segmenting them from other customers.
3.2 Type of Machine
There are three options for the type of machine that a service runs on: physical machine,
virtual machine, and process container. The decision between physical, virtual, and con-
tainerisatechnical decision.Eachhasdifferentperformance, resourceefficiency,andisol-
ation capabilities. The desired technical attributes should guide your decision on which to
use.