Cloud Service Provider Offerings- An Overview
Cloud computing over the past decade has been well-positioned as a major contributor to the IT industry. Nowadays, developers who intend to build their web-based applications require far less effort, cost and time to deploy their services. Cloud Computing is defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as “a ubiquitous, and convenient model that is available on-demand and whose network access is shared by a pool of configurable computing resources that can be provisioned with minimal service provider interaction”. Most cloud services work on a “pay-as-you-go” model which is subscription-based and summarizes cost based on total computing capacity consumed.
The cloud services provided by these companies cater to the vast majority of the IT industry. As a general standard, all these providers provide similar cloud services with minor variations in performance characteristics. The most popular opinion about the vast array of cloud providers is that the choice of an external organization to use cloud services is entirely dependent on their requirement, which is either :
1) Based on Location 2) Based on the Service offering
Based on Location:
There are four types of cloud deployments categorized based on the location:
a) Public Cloud: Cloud hosted on a public platform is recommended for public users. Customers cannot control where the public cloud is hosted i.e. the location of the public cloud. Costs are either free or mutually shared by subscription-based agreements. Public clouds are highly scalable, cheaper and generally used by organizations that use it as an umbrella to control the hosted application. The public is moderately reliable, level of security authentication is dependent on the service provider. A popular example of a public hosted cloud services would be the Amazon EC2 (Infrastructure-as-a-service)
b) Private Cloud: Cloud hosted for the sole purpose of a single entity or organization. As a single controller of the cloud service, an organization has control over either internal/external hosting of the service, it’s data security which is internally controlled by firewalls kept in place and its runtime. A private cloud is more often linked with existing resources in place and controlled by private users who can provide resources in a dynamically evolving environment. Apart from its scalability being limited and its cost being relatively higher, the provision ranks higher in its reliability, security and performance. Common examples of private cloud service would “VMWare, Xen”
c) Community Cloud: Community clouds are used by a group of entities having a common cloud computing purpose or belong to a community of organizations with similar needs. The community cloud users have common purposes such as safety, implementation and privacy measures in place. A community cloud has reliability ranging between medium and high depending on need, highly secure, scalable and good performance characteristics. An example of a community cloud would be VMware used in banks.
d) Hybrid Cloud: A hybrid cloud uses a combination of private and public cloud environments and it can be managed separately. A hybrid cloud is heterogeneous and provides high security, performance and scalability characteristics. It provisions the use of features from either a public or private cloud environment depending on need. An example of hybrid clouds would be VMware’s vcloud
Based on Service offering:
There are predominantly three types of cloud services based on service offerings wherein each type provide a different level of authority, versatility and management:
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a type of cloud computing service that uses a multiple user architecture enabling users to access it through the web. There is a dual benefit to both the end-users and the cloud service provider as there are no up-time maintenance costs or the need for licensed software. As compared to cloud hosting services, SaaS is relatively easy to maintain, and the costs are low. The most popular of the enterprise applications associated with SaaS are Salesforce and Google Apps amongst many others. SaaS solutions provided in general are a form of utility computing, that does not require installation on the client’s side due to its efficient web delivery framework. It uses web services to make applications operational at the client’s end. Majority of SaaS solutions run independently on the web browser, however, some may require the installation of plugins.
As these solutions are monitored by third parties whose specific purpose is to provide maintenance support, there is higher reliability in their efforts towards the overall functioning of the service.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) commonly known as web services in the cloud is a variant of SaaS wherein a web platform is used in place of an application. Cloud providers offer developers access to their Application Programming Interface (API) layer that helps them use their functionalities to deploy web platforms. The model of the service is designed for developers to use the cloud providers environments to deploy applications using in-built functionalities delivered as a service to other users over the internet.
However, the developers are confined by the API layer set by the cloud provider thus comprising on performance and integration while deploying their applications. PaaS provides a quicker deployment route for developers as the platform’s operational elements such as server storage, network, virtualization etc are handled by a third-party vendor specifically for this purpose. Due to its presence in the cloud, it uses advantageous features such as dynamic scaling, database storage with constant queries, load balancing, dynamic web serving and API authentication using google accounts. Thus, it makes the platform easy and quick to deploy which can be auto-scaled whenever necessary.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the provision of on-demand infrastructure by a cloud provider enabling the use of structurally designed computing resources such as storage, networking, process capacity and hardware to an organization through the internet. The computing resources are available on a virtual machine which is developed on virtualization technique and is billed as an on-demand service.
The premise of the IaaS architecture design is that it’s easily scalable and all the computing resources provided in a virtual environment are capable to manage the client’s variable loads even during peak times. The architectural framework of IaaS solutions provided by cloud providers are confined which may impact specific solutions, an organization is trying to deliver. It is pivotal to identify current and future strategic technological objectives prior to considering various IaaS architectures.
Amongst a variety of published articles discussing the differences between cloud service providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) stands out as a market leader as of 2019. According to (RightScale, 2018), AWS leads the way for cloud service adoption rate at 68% and has 58% footprint of greater than 50 Virtual machines (VMs) as shown in the image below:
As part of a cloud provider competition positioning survey in 2018, the annual growth rate of AWS to its market share was classified as the highest. Nevertheless, companies use different service providers based on use case. Ideally, a good way to compare cloud service providers is by using the cloud comparison Cloud Comparison Tool. In that way, an organization can choose a service provider or rather a specific service offering to satisfy its prerequisites.
Thank you for Reading!
References
A View of Cloud Computing: By Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Junho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia. Communications of the ACM, April 2010, Vol. 53 №4, Pages 50–58 10.1145/1721654.1721672
The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing: Recommendations of the National Institute of Standards and Technology: Peter Mell, Timothy Grance, 2011 Cloud Computing: A Paradigm Shift in IT Infrastructure, Debranjan Pal et al, 2015
Cloud Computing: Implementation, Management and Security: John Rittinghouse, 2009
Blog: https://www.esds.co.in/blog/public-cloud-and-infrastructure-as-a-serviceiaas/#sthash.0wcGbsSf.dpbs
Blog: https://www.uniprint.net/en/7-types-cloud-computing-structures/
Blog: http://www.nodericks.com/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-vs-ibm-cloud-best/ Blog: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/11/15/the-next-evolutionarystep-for-cloud-computing/#6001e8716dd7
Gartner, 2019: Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide, Analysts: David Wright, Dennis Smith, Raj Bala, Bob Gill
Right Scale 2018 State of the Cloud Report: Data to navigate your cloud strategy: https://www.suse.com/media/report/rightscale_2018_state_of_the_cloud_report.pdf
Blog: https://techblog.comsoc.org/2019/02/05/synergy-research-cloud-service-providerrankings/
Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices, October 2018: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_Cloud_Best_Practices.pdf
Cloud Comparison Tool: https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/
