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Vendors Offering IaaS Public Cloud Services
The description of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is straightforward. Cloud infrastructure such as storage, servers and networks are available on rent in a pay-as-you-use model. There are many players in this field of public cloud services and below is a classification and comparison of the three most dominant leaders of the industry in IaaS.
IBM SmartCloud
IBM provides cloud computing services called Blue Cloud that presents tools over IBM Cloud to manage large scale applications and database. IBM also offers consulting services to assimilate infrastructure into the cloud. IBM offers robust Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Choose from self-service IaaS or managed IaaS to deploy and scale virtual infrastructure, develop applications and run production-ready systems. The IaaS offered by IBM SmartCloud is an ideal solution for organizations managing a large number of developers and testers who need to allocate storage and deploy virtual machines efficiently. It gives and option to manage administrator and user roles, set limits on resources and provide a report on user activity. Apart from Iaas, IBM also offers PaaS (Platform As a Service) and SaaS(Software As a Service) services. IBM SmartCloud has a 5-tier model for its Enterprise users (Marston et al., 2011).
Rackspace Open Cloud
Rackspace provides core cloud computing services. It’s a co-founder of OpenStack – an open source framework that it uses for its cloud infrastructure. Rackspace IaaS offers to choose from an array of operating systems, including Windows Server, flavours of Linux and for some extra fee basic monitoring checks can also be enabled.
Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute
Amazon is a leader in public IaaS arena with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) having the biggest market share. The portfolio of services running atop its Xen-based virtualized infrastructure is huge while Amazon keeps lowering its prices. Amazon has a ecosystem of partners around its public cloud, and has all the required security and compliance certifications for its world-wide data center. Amazon WS has specialized services like Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), Cluster GPU instances and Elastic Block Storage (EBS). Amazon IaaS give away infrastructure services as message passing, workflows, in-memory caching, archival storage and search services.
Comparison of IaaS Providers
1. Harvey Norman on Azure
Reference: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Windows-Azure/Harvey-Norman/Retailer-reduces-the-risk-and-capital-costs-of-launching-online-bargain-site-with-highly-flexible-cloud-hosting/710000001566
Harvey Norman is a retail company with stores in Australia, Southeast Asia, Europe and New Zealand. The company specializes in computer and electrical goods, furniture and bedding.
Windows Azure is a Microsoft cloud-computing platform that is used to host, build and scale web applications. It builds applications across any operating system or language. The service is pay-as-you-use, and it can be quickly upgraded to new capacity through the customer portal.
Problem
Harvey Norman is an Australian retailer, and they wanted to launch an online daily-deals business. The dilemma it executives faced was that if they overvalued web site traffic it could dissipate millions of dollars in acquiring hosting servers and if they underestimated the site would crash due to the volume. Speed was important, and they required the site up and running in eight weeks along with logistics, unfortunately, Harvey Norman group did not possess the systems or technologies to achieve this task.
Solution
Microsoft cloud computing platform, Windows Azure came as a solution to the problem and Harvey Norman utilized its services to launch their e-commerce site in early 2011. With Azure, it could rapidly increase or decrease the cloud-based infrastructure according to the customer demand thus giving a much needed flexibility in terms of cost and infrastructure.
The Cloud Advantage
Windows Azure gave a significant advantage to the company not only in terms of cost, and scalability. The most significant technological advantages from cloud computing approach are:
- Cloud server enables ease of monitoring server utilization.
- Agility of adding new servers. New servers are up and running in 15-45 minutes.
- The new “BiG BUYS” site of Harvey Norman was built within eight weeks. The site launched exactly on time.
- Site on the cloud server is easy to be managed.
- Business can be easily monitored, managing the cost of sales without extra investments.
- Cloud hosting enabled the “BiG BUYS” site with a spike in traffic.
- Three servers on the cloud accommodated 15-20000 page views.
- Cloud server enables to add more servers as demand sore.
- The cloud platform gives a good customer experience by increasing the response time of the site.
- Server infrastructure became an operational expense instead of capital investment, enabling the company to pay only what it uses.
- Windows Azure widens the scope of developers helping Harvey Norman to utilize preferred technologies like Java, PHP or any other non-Microsoft technology.
- Major Linux OS like openSUSE, Ubuntu, CentOS and SUSELinux are on Azure.
- The ability to distribute video content over the cloud has increased.
- According to Director of Harvey Norman, Azure cloud helps them increase or decrease the infrastructure according to customer demand that gives a much needed flexibility.
2. Spotify on AWS
Reference: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/spotify/
Spotify is an online music service presenting over 16 million licensed songs. It is obtainable for Mac OS and Windows operating systems, as well as mobile device platforms. Spotify users can enjoy music on a wide range of mobile devices. Users enjoy instant access to one of the world’s biggest music libraries and share music on different social platforms.
Problem
The company’s aim is to enable users listen to the music they require, wherever they require, whenever they want. The challenge it faces was of cataloging popular tracks for the current day and yesterday and also all those to releasing in the future. It adds over 20,000 tracks to its catalogue daily. Spotify required a solution that could scale quickly without long upgrade time. It becomes imperative to design a system that can respond to variations and scale without impacting the performance.
Solution
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) came to rescue, and it is a mature large-scale product. It enables to expand storage quickly while providing a high data stability. With Amazon S3, it was possible to scale the application according to the demand thus providing the required flexibility in terms of cost and infrastructure.
The Cloud Advantage
The cloud-based infrastructure provided Spotify a significant technical advantage to meet its evolving business goals. The advantages can be observed as below:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps Spotify estimate its infrastructure in order to gather its growing business needs.
- It enables an increased development and deployment cycles.
- Company can frequently examine its needs to integrating new services to existing stack.
- A highly responsive system is created.
- Significant reduction of time has occurred in establishing new storage; the required several months of preparation have been reduced to few hours through Amazon services.
- The company’s infrastructure can spontaneously fine-tune to any shift in user demand.
- It gave the ability to go from a complex system architecture design and capacity planning to an online running production system in very little time.
3. reddit on AWS
Reference: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/reddit/
reddit is a place to find out what’s new online. It is open source and driven by community members are that are constantly contributing features, providing bug fixes, and translations.
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web-service that enables cloud computing. It facilitates developers to design web-scale computing. It provides complete control over computing resources and runs on a robust environment. It reduces the time required to acquire and boot new server instances.
Problem
reddit was running on 10-12 servers and in 2012, it had a big milestone when it was required to add 30 servers for a major event. It later figured out that that capacity was not enough, and it was required to add more servers.
Solution
An Amazon EC2 cloud service enables to scale and provides the flexibility of shifting resources. It is no wonder that such a big site like reddit with over a million daily unique customer is running with only 20 employees.
The Cloud Advantage
The cloud-based infrastructure provided reddit a significant technical advantage to scale. The advantages can be observed as below:
- Amazon EC2 allows enhancing or decreasing capacity in minutes with absolute control over the instances.
- There is a multitude of choices in terms of operating system, configuration memory, CPU, data storage.
- It provides a complete, robust solution in computing with Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Rational Database Service and Amazon VPC all working in conjunction.
- It provides a highly reliable environment where new adding new server instances is swift.
- It enables a financial benefit with low rate for capacity consumption and pay-as-you-use features.
- It allows creating On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances or Spot Instances.
- Software applications can be quickly deployed to Amazon EC2 through 1-Click launch or EC2 console.
4. Gorilla Group on Rackspace
Reference: http://www.youtube.com/embed/RZUY2qgejEI
Gorilla Group is a solution provider offering e-commerce based interactive design and strategy solutions for their customers.
Rackspace is a main player in hybrid cloud and also the founder of OpenStack. Rackspace provides managed public, private cloud services. It operates data centers across four continents.
Problem
The challenge being faced by GorillaGroup was of Global and complex deployments and increasing customer base.
Solution
Rackspace cloud helped expanding their brand, by presenting GorillaGroup's work with the best in the hosting industry. Rackspace infrastructure, support streamlined implementation making it easier to keep deadline promises.
The Cloud Advantage
The cloud-based infrastructure provided by Rackspace gave significant technical advantage to GorillaGroup in scaling up their operations and meeting new customer demands as well as expanding their customer base. The advantages can be observed as below:
- Availability of high-end technology over the cloud without added expenditure.
- Availability of managed hosting managed cloud, cloud Servers, and cloud load balancers.
- Provided hosting solution to clients who have been never online before.
- Provided solution to the client using Rackspace cloud who wants to propel their business to a higher level in terms of revenue generation.
- Increased volume output and productivity with fewer people. Cost per unit goes down as company expands.
- Reduced capital cost as big money spend on hardware or software licensing significantly decrease.
- Availability of major Operating Systems on the cloud and also a choice of latest technologies to choose from for the developers.
- Reduced operational cost with the pay-as-you-use model.
5. Silversky on IBM Cloud
Reference: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/42297.wss
SilverSky is a provider of security solutions. Their Security-as-a-Service platform distribute cloud-based software and services like “Email Protection Suite”, “Network Protection Suite”, and managed email services. SilverSky look after $525 billion in customer property and handles about 500 million security events every day. It deals in retail, healthcare, financial services, critical infrastructure, manufacturing sectors and energy.
IBM is a global leader in cloud-computing with an impressive portfolio of open-cloud solutions. SoftLayer, an IBM Company, operates a cloud infrastructure at Internet scale. SoftLayer provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to its customers.
Problem
Privacy and Security concerns continue to restrain widespread cloud email adoption. Companies are seeking out low-cost and low-touch security offerings. SilverSky was also facing the same challenge of increased cost and higher risk in serving its customers.
Solution
An independent study by SilverSky discovered that security decision-makers want to move functions, such as email, to the cloud in order to reduce expenditures, simplify operations and enhance the trustworthiness of business functions. The study provides a significant reason for SilverSky to shift their operations on the cloud and also benefit from the pay-as-you-use model of cloud-based services. SilverSky chose SoftLayer thus moving from a broad infrastructure platform to lower cost platform, with the ability to scale and customize its infrastructure based on the business needs.
The Cloud Advantage
Some of the significant technical advantages that a cloud solution from IBM Cloud gave to the business of SilverSky are:
- The SoftLayer platform enables disaster recovery providing unmatched availability and reliability for customers.
- SoftLayer has datacenters worldwide that gives SilverSky enhanced prospects of increasing its international presence and reaching out to newer markets.
- IBM Cloud facilitates SilverSky distribution channels by enabling its customers to procure services directly through IBM or SilverSky and its partners.
- IBM Cloud enables speed and higher security and messaging solutions that are cloud-based simple to use.
- High availability of cloud-based email deployments adds empowers the business.
- IBM cloud enables Geo-redundancy and faster disaster recovery ability.
Acme University: Cloud Based Architectural Solution
Business Needs
Acme University wants to create a system to encode, store and present their lecture videos. They believe this will be useful to other universities and will allow other universities to also use their facilities, but they will be charged for all their usage (compute, traffic, and storage). The university will write the software (in PHP), but they want to utilize as much existing technology as possible.
While the university is in New Zealand, they have had requests from asian universities and believe that they need to support those Asian universities with closer sites than Australia or New Zealand to ensure optimal performance.
The application will allow students from an institution to connect using their university credentials. Once authenticated, the students can access any lecture they wish from their own institution.
Acme University wants to be able to ensure a robust solution that will scale on demand and can cope with heavy workloads as the university expects over 100 lectures encoded each week in their institution alone. Acme also wants to ensure that all usage will be accountable to the appropriate university for billing purposes.
Lastly, Acme wants to ensure service will be fully monitored and whilst any errors are managed, logging will record those issues and how they were dealt with.
Cloud Based Solution
There are many public cloud solution providers that offer pay-as-you-use cloud services, with a variety of infrastructure, software services and virtualization. The factors to be considered for selecting a effective cloud provider are Elastic Compute Cluster, response time in terms of operation, consistency and cost per operation. The solution for Acme University is to procure the services of Windows Azure.
Reference
Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J., & Ghalsasi, A. (2011).
Cloud computing—The business perspective. Decision Support Systems, 51(1), 176-189.
Li, A., Yang, X., Kandula, S., & Zhang, M. (2010, November).
CloudCmp: comparing public cloud providers. In Proceedings of the
10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement (pp. 1-14). ACM.
