Cloud Technology: Choosing a Public Cloud Provider

As you almost certainly know by now, the world is chock full of cloud providers.  Hundreds of them.  Which should you choose if you're just getting started and why?

Like most "which technology should I use?" questions, this one has the typical answer, "it depends."  If you only want to use or "rent" somebody else's software for maximum convenience, you want a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution.  Now that the easy answer is out of the way, let's get down to business.

IaaS or PaaS?

At first blush, it seems like a simple question:  Do you want direct access to the infrastructure (e.g., virtual machines) or do you only need access to abstractions (e.g., API's)?  Ideally, you'd want both.  Sometimes you want the convenience of pre-built, hosted, scalable services such as storage (think Amazon's S3), but other times you'd like the complete flexibility of having root access to a virtual machine under your control.  I expect most enterprise developers and IT folks will agree.  We want the best of all worlds and we have a hard time giving up control to a pure PaaS provider.  This stance tends to rule out options like Google App Engine, Heroku, and others that look like a black box from the outside and put significant restrictions on the programming languages, application frameworks, databases, and other technologies you can deploy on them.  Let me be clear however, that I would still strongly consider deploying to many of these platforms for specific use cases.  An instance where I'm not as concerned about complete implementation control or strict compliance with industry standards that demand I know exactly what's going on with my data at all times and require me to prove it.

I call the "both" answer "IaaS with benefits".  Among others, the list of providers in this category includes Amazon AWS, Rackspace, and Windows Azure.  Each "IaaS with benefits" provider lets you control a virtual machine from the ground up.  It also gives you a variety of PaaS services such as blob storage, data stores, queues, and other features.  The menu of additional services ranges from just a few (e.g., Rackspace) to dozens (e.g., Amazon AWS), which means it can be an important dimension to compare when you're considering a vendor.

In summary, here's my quick answer to the "IaaS or PaaS" question:  IaaS if you want total control, PaaS if you want scalability with less administration, and "IaaS with benefits" if you want to mix and match the best parts of each.

New to the Cloud?

If you're new to cloud, it's probably easier to start with an IaaS solution that gives you complete access to virtual machines.  That way things are similar to what you've experienced in the past and keeps the learning curve manageable.  Once you get comfortable with the environment, you might want to look into cloud storage and other "benefits" that provide flexibility and scalability.  I also recommend you try different clouds to get a good feel for their feature sets and associated pros and cons.  After a while, you'll have a pretty good feel for performance, reliability, manageability, and cost of various workloads on particular clouds.

This may sound like a lot of work, and it is, but enterprises never have a one-size-fits-all solution for anything.  Each use case comes with its own requirements and therefore certain technologies are a better implementation fit than others.  Over time, this naturally leads to using a bunch of different technologies, such as open source projects and cloud providers.  Don't try to hold back the tide, but rather embrace this diversity!  Use the best tool for each job to get better results and happier technologists.

Conclusion

Pick a cloud provider that lets you get started quickly and easily, but will grow with you over time.  Better yet, choose an abstraction technology like CloudSwing that lets you select where you want to deploy each application.  That way you can rapidly try different clouds and learn which works best for each of your use cases without concern for cloud lock-in.  Whichever route you take, consider "IaaS with benefits" solutions for the flexibility and the option for total control.



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