E-Book MANAGING A MULTI-CLOUD ENVIRONMENT July 2016 MATCHING APPS WITH CLOUD PROVIDERS Businesses looking to shift applications to cloud services need to consider factors such as legacy infrastructure, application architecture and the need for global reach. It’s also important to examine the strengths and weaknesses of cloud providers before making any migration decision. BY KURT MARKO

DGrowing Market

DBreaking Down Billing Models

DCloud Native vs. Traditional Apps

DApplications Drive Service Selection

DCloud Providers’ Parallels MANAGING A MULTI-CLOUD ENVIRONMENT

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Growing Market

Cloud Native vs. Traditional Apps

Cloud Providers’ Parallels

Breaking Down Billing Models FTER YEARS OF existing vendor relationships, regulatory requirements and foot-dragging, the need for global reach and distribution. Applications Drive most IT orga- To be successful, an organization needs to look closely at Service Selection nizations have the details about the capabilities, advantages and similari- concluded that ties of the major IaaS providers. Plus, decision makers will resistance to cloud infrastructure is futile. Industry giants want to evaluate the options in light of their existing and Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are ap- planned application portfolio. proaching sales of a billion dollars a month and announcing commitments by major business converts such as Capital One,A GE and Netflix to move business IT operations to in- GROWING MARKET frastructure as a service (IaaS). Though the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure is Now the question for most IT organizations isn’t if it still quite fragmented, a handful of vendors garner just over should use cloud services, but when, where and which ones. half the total revenue: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Knowing when to use cloud computing is a matter of corpo- Cloud, IBM Softlayer, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce. Fig- rate strategy and IT cloud maturity. But determining where ures compiled by Synergy Research show that AWS alone and which services—namely the list of applications to mi- owns about one-third of the IaaS market, while both Azure grate and cloud providers to adopt—is dependent on myriad and Google are growing annually at triple-digit rates. factors, including legacy infrastructure, private/hybrid AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are the best options in a cloud plans, application architecture, service requirements, multi-tenant, public cloud infrastructure. IBM, meanwhile,

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Growing Market provides an interesting mix of an open source IaaS, IBM vendors have added richer, higher-level features such as platform as a service (PaaS) and hosted bare metal servers. machine learning, business intelligence (BI), streaming data Cloud Native vs. With IBM’s use of OpenStack for IaaS and hybrid cloud, one ingestion (IoT), mobile app backends and serverless, event- Traditional Apps could lump it into the broader OpenStack public cloud eco- driven microservices to their portfolios. The result is con- system, e.g., Dreamhost, Internap, Rackspace and others. siderable overlap between products such as AWS or Azure Cloud Providers’ Parallels However, IBM has a much richer portfolio than those other and traditional pure-play PaaS products such as Cloud options. Foundry (Pivotal and IBM Bluemix), Force.com and Heroku

Breaking Down VMware—given its dominant position as the virtualiza- (Salesforce) or OpenShift (Red Hat). Billing Models tion platform of choice in business data centers—is also Although AWS and Azure don’t draw sharp distinctions worth mentioning because of its vCloud Air product and between their infrastructure and platform services, Google Applications Drive network of service partners. VMware’s vCloud illustrates (App Engine) and IBM (Bluemix) do, with clearly identified Service Selection an important distinction between public cloud services: and branded PaaS stacks. Blending IaaS and PaaS services the level of support for hybrid deployments. Although all means the selection of a cloud provider is no longer IT’s vendors provide ways of securely connecting private infra- alone, since it’s not a choice solely about infrastructure. In- structure and public resources, AWS and Google are notable deed, with the growing variety and sophistication of applica- for only being available as shared services. In contrast, tion services, along with alternative deployment vehicles OpenStack, vCloud and, by the end of 2016, Azure can be such as app containers and event-driven compute services, deployed and managed by internal IT. This public-private/ developers play an increasingly important, and perhaps hybrid dichotomy is an important decision criterion. central, role in evaluating and selecting cloud providers. Although Salesforce has some sophisticated application development services, it’s primarily used as a packaged ap- plication, i.e., SaaS, rather than an application platform CLOUD NATIVE VS. TRADITIONAL APPS (PaaS). Salesforce can thus be seen as qualitatively different A fundamental factor when evaluating cloud providers is the from the other four cloud leaders. type of applications planned for cloud deployment. Indeed, Infrastructure and platform services were once consid- it illustrates the role developers must play in the selection ered well-defined and distinct service paradigms in the XaaS process because the cloud is far more than a new deploy- (anything as a service) hierarchy. Over time, traditional IaaS ment location. Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft’s chief architect for

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Growing Market enterprise cloud, wrote on the company’s website in 2015 shared infrastructure and thus quickly deployed, moved that cloud is “a way of building and running infrastructure and scaled. In contrast, legacy, client-server applications are Cloud Native vs. that prioritizes speed and [empowers] developers to do built assuming ownership of an entire OS. They are shoe- Traditional Apps their best work.” horned into shared infrastructure via hypervisors and VMs; Whether you call it cloud-native or third platform, cloud in other words, they can run on, but aren’t built for, the cloud. Cloud Providers’ Parallels services have ushered in new ways of designing, partition- This architectural distinction has profound implica- ing, scaling, testing and deploying applications that are tions on the type of cloud service that’s best for a particular

Breaking Down profoundly different from those in the prior client-server organization. Some products mimic the VM environment Billing Models (second platform) and mainframe (first platform) eras of IT. of internal data centers; others are mostly a collection of Cloud-first, greenfield apps are extremely modular. They RESTful services and APIs that can be mashed up into any Applications Drive are built around cloud services and API calls, designed for type of application. A prime example of the contrasting Service Selection

How Traditional vs. Cloud-Native Apps Differ

TRADITIONAL CLOUD-NATIVE

monolithic modular and service-oriented

run as a VM a collection of containers and services

scale-up architecture scale-out architecture

difficult to install, configure and deploy easily automated, moved and scaled

extensive use and modification of existing largely self-contained data usage with batch on-premises data sets updates to legacy systems

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Growing Market approaches is the bifurcation of EMC/VMware’s private CLOUD PROVIDERS’ PARALLELS cloud product line. Its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud based on The major cloud vendors are fiercely competitive. Even so, Cloud Native vs. vSphere is designed for traditional applications, while the when looked at as a bundle of compute, storage, network, Traditional Apps Native Hybrid Cloud—released in May 2016— targets next- data, application, security and management services, they generation, modular, microservice-based designs. have more in common than not. Since AWS is the top dog, Cloud Providers’ Parallels The dichotomy carries over to the public cloud when with the most customers and deepest service portfolio, it looking at the varying ways people use AWS. By offering effectively sets the standard others attempt to match. It’s a

Breaking Down basic compute (Elastic Compute Cloud), storage volumes challenge, since AWS is constantly releasing new services Billing Models (Elastic Block Store), file systems (EFS) and private net- and enhancing existing ones, but Azure, Google and IBM works (VPC), AWS can be made to look like a bunch of VMs have advantages in certain situations. Applications Drive and network-attached storage running in a private data cen- The AWS portfolio is divided into three categories with 12 Service Selection ter. That would be perfect for legacy databases and server- focus areas: based applications. However, AWS can also be a platform for applications that are infrastructure agnostic and based on ■■Core Infrastructure: VMs, containers, storage (object, higher-level services like NoSQL databases, BI processing, block, file), database (relational, NoSQL, caching) and net- Hadoop-like clusters, message queues, push notification working (VPNs, DNS, load balancing) services, media transcoders and search engines. With these contrasts in mind, when thinking about cloud ■■Application Platform: data analytics (BI, machine learn- providers, consider the type of applications you’ll deploy ing, extract, transform, and load (ETL), Hadoop), business and where they fall on the spectrum between traditional applications (VDI, email, document sharing), mobile back- and cloud-native. end/MBaaS (device sync, notifications, API management), Applications that fall predominantly on the traditional IoT (device registry, virtual device instances/shadows, rules side of the range will work best on systems like vCloud or engine) Softlayer bare metal servers that resemble traditional VM infrastructure, i.e., servers and a hypervisor. Those shifted ■■Developer and Operations Support: source code to the cloud-native side are better suited for an IaaS/PaaS management and deployment, deployment automa- combination such as AWS, Azure and Google. tion and monitoring, security and identity management,

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Growing Market miscellaneous services (media transcoding, message queue, IBM Cloud defies easy comparison since it’s an amalgam serverless apps, search). of home-grown and acquired services pieced together under Cloud Native vs. one product umbrella; however, it too offers core infrastruc- Traditional Apps Every cloud provider does core infrastructure and covers ture (Softlayer), platform (Bluemix) and application-spe- the basics of developer and operations support and manage- cific services (what it calls solutions) for specific areas such Cloud Providers’ Parallels ment. And all provide a wide variety of compute instance as mobile development, big data, security and so forth. configurations, allowing buyers to mix and match core Because its origins are in on-premises virtualization,

Breaking Down count, memory size and local storage performance (i.e., hard vCloud Air focuses on core infrastructure and management. Billing Models disk drive, solid-state drives, guaranteed IOPs). Indeed, the core benefit of vCloud is that it acts as an exten- Where providers diverge is in support and implementa- sion of existing, on-premises VMware infrastructure using Applications Drive tion of platform services in the application platform cat- the management console and service concepts that vSphere Service Selection egory. Azure, Google and IBM all provide BI and big data administrators are already familiar with. services, but they differ in exact capabilities, APIs, scal- ability/capacity, etc. Deeper into the PaaS stack, areas such as MBaaS, IoT and API management/gateways are where BREAKING DOWN BILLING MODELS AWS has aggressively developed new service offerings and An important area where cloud services differ is in the thus the categories where you’ll find gaps with other provid- granularity of service consumption and billing. AWS again ers. For example, IoT is a nascent application platform with sets the standard with on-demand instances billed by the both AWS and Azure aggressively courting developers with hour; however, Amazon has introduced other pricing tiers targeted services, APIs and software developer’s kits that, with discounts for reserving and prepaying for partial or while conceptually similar, are unique and unlike anything full resources over one- and three-year subscriptions. Both Google currently offers. Azure and Google follow the on-demand model, although Given that AWS sets the de facto cloud standard, its two Google offers discounts for what it terms “sustained use,” main competitors (Azure and Google) have developed com- which target the same use cases as AWS Reserved Instances. parison tables of their respective services. These are valu- Google even offers per-minute billing for compute instances able references for comparison shoppers already familiar (with a 10-minute minimum) and automatic rate discounts with AWS. with increased usage; this increases pricing granularly.

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Growing Market This is a key advantage for cloud-native applications, as networking and disk technology” while finding that Google is Google’s ability to rapidly and automatically spin up in- had a superior pricing model with strong plans for the fu- Cloud Native vs. stances in under a minute. ture. While the results for your business may differ based on Traditional Apps AWS also sells excess capacity, typically at a deep dis- specific needs, the research that went into Quizlet’s deter- count, on a spot market. Customers bid for resources, but mination is indicative of the depth of knowledge that should Cloud Providers’ Parallels service delivery depends on availability and demand and inform any business’ decision on a cloud provider. isn’t guaranteed. Azure also offers this, while Google has

Breaking Down something comparable with its pre-emptible pricing. Billing Models Cloud pricing is inherently idiosyncratic. A particular APPS DRIVE SERVICE SELECTION application’s design, performance requirements and us- As the Quizlet example demonstrated, an organization’s Applications Drive age won’t be the same as another’s, so it is difficult to make present and future application requirements and usage are Service Selection broad and universally applicable statements about the ven- the most important criteria when selecting a cloud provider. dor pricing. Instead, cloud buyers should run estimates us- Here are some general guidelines: ing their own real-world scenarios. An instructive, real-world example of how pricing differ- ■■Traditional business apps already running on VMware ences, both in the underlying rates and discount model, can and using vSphere for operations management are a natu- give an advantage to one cloud provider over another comes ral fit for vCloud. Similarly, Windows Server shops will like from Quizlet, an online education site. Quizlet’s infrastruc- Azure, especially since they can soon run their own private ture team did an exhaustive study comparing its existing Azure infrastructure using Azure Stack. AWS installation and bills with Google Cloud. After survey- ing the cloud market, the options were narrowed to staying ■■VMware or Windows users that don’t need seamlessly in- at AWS or moving to Google. Quizlet then benchmarked the tegrated private-public infrastructure management can use performance of attributes most relevant to its application, any IaaS for legacy workloads along with third-party man- CPU, memory, networking and disk I/O, and modeled its agement software such as RightScale, Scalr and Cliqr (now cost on both platforms. part of Cisco). These provide a unified management console, Quizlet chose Google Cloud after determining that and automate workload management, monitoring and mi- Google offered “better core technology, in particular its gration across platforms.

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Growing Market ■■Platform selection for greenfield applications should be around a cloud vendor’s management features and devel- driven by developer requirements. This will likely lead you opers use higher-level application services, it becomes Cloud Native vs. to AWS, Azure PaaS, Google Cloud (to include Compute, increasingly difficult to migrate wholesale to another pro- Traditional Apps App and Container Engine) or OpenStack (using a provider vider. That said, organizations should be wary of paralysis in its public cloud ecosystem) plus a PaaS like Bluemix or by analysis. Cloud vendors make it easy and cheap to try Cloud Providers’ Parallels Cloud Foundry. As Quizlet showed, Google works well for their services without commitment, so there’s no reason not highly modular, distributed apps that can exploit its granu- to experiment a bit before making a decision.

Breaking Down lar billing model, ability to rapidly scale infrastructure and Although there’s an emphasis on selecting a provider Billing Models support for app containers and container clusters. based on application and infrastructure requirements, these should be forward-looking and reflect where the orga- Applications Drive ■■Specific needs for mobile or IoT backends are best at AWS nization is going—not optimized for legacy systems. Still, if Service Selection or Azure with services tailored to these applications or existing systems have a long-term future, balance cloud op- using a niche MBaaS product such as Kinvey, Kony, Feed- timization with possible management complexity; the ideal Henry or others. cloud may not integrate well with existing systems. Here organizations should consider a bimodal IT strat- As cloud services have become mainstream alternatives egy for legacy versus cloud systems in which new systems for IT infrastructure and applications, the process of select- are developed with Agile and DevOps methodologies and ing a cloud provider is shifting. What might once have been targeted solely to cloud deployment. Although this won’t be ad hoc, where early-adopter developers and a department appropriate everywhere, it’s one way to simplify the cloud- credit card set de facto standards for the entire organiza- legacy integration problem. It facilitates using two primary tion, has moved to rigorous, technical and financial analysis cloud providers optimized for different applications and befitting any other strategic IT decision. parts of your infrastructure. It pays to be thorough, since cloud platforms—such as As developers evaluate cloud platforms, they shouldn’t databases, ERP systems and other core IT infrastructure— just focus on the services provided, but also the APIs, SDKs create a lot of “data gravity” and come with a high propen- and integrated development environment support. For sity for lock-in. While it’s easy to migrate simple virtualized example, Azure is tightly integrated with the entire Win- workloads from one cloud to another, as IT builds processes dows development toolchain, which reduces friction for

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Growing Market Microsoft shops. Likewise, many third-party apps and pri- vate cloud platforms support AWS APIs, making it easy to Cloud Native vs. target AWS. Also, don’t forget third-party software support Traditional Apps for various cloud platforms. AWS has a thriving market- place that provides packaged apps ready to run. Cloud Providers’ Parallels Finally, consider your regulatory and data-protection Matching Apps With Cloud Providers requirements. This is critical for multinationals doing busi- is a SearchCloudComputing.com e-publication.

Breaking Down ness in Europe, Canada and other locales with strict data Margie Semilof | Editorial Director Billing Models protection laws. Major cloud vendors continue to add data centers in jurisdictions with stringent privacy rules, using Phil Sweeney | Senior Managing Editor Applications Drive tools and legal protections to ensure customers are com- Dan Cagen | Associate Features Editor Service Selection pliant and don’t illegally transmit protected data across Linda Koury | Director of Online Design sovereign boundaries. Smaller or regionally focused cloud Rebecca Kitchens | Publisher players, however, can create compliance headaches for or- [email protected] ganizations holding data from customers subject to restric- n tive privacy laws. TechTarget, 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466 www.techtarget.com KURT MARKO is an engineer with experience designing and building digital systems. He now provides analysis, consulting © 2016 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or repro- and communications on IT. duced in any form or by any means without written permission from the pub- lisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group.

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