Deployments

In 2019, we have a big variety of Cloud Offerings. I believe that deployment in the cloud is the best fit in almost all cases. With a few exceptions. So before comparing cloud service providers, let’s talk about why you would deploy to the cloud and what alternatives you have.

Deployment types

Cloud deployment

Instead of bothering with setting up your servers in the basement, you can rent compute power and storage from a company like AWS or Azure. In fact, ever since AWS was launched in 2006, the software world is changing in this direction. There are many advantages to this:

• With the Cloud, you can use dynamic scaling to cut costs. In low-pressure times, reduce the number of servers and in high-pressure times increase them. Since you pay-per-minute or per-hour, you can dramatically decrease costs.

• The initial setup and deployment are much easier. In some cases, like with Azure App Service, deploying to a server for the first time is literally a few clicks.

• You need to employ much fewer sys-admins (but a few DevOps engineers).

• You no longer need to buy server machines, store them in the basement and upkeep them. It’s all in the cloud man.

On-premise deployment

On-premise servers is the way organizations worked up to 2006. You had a server room and an army of sys-admins to keep them running. In 2019, we still have a lot of on-premise deployments. These companies either started on-premise and just didn’t move to the cloud or they have some good reasons to stay on-premise. You should consider staying on-premise if:

• You have some security or legal issues to place your server in the cloud. Maybe it’s software in the military and government sectors.

• You’ve invested so much effort in your on-premise server farm that it no longer makes sense moving to the cloud. It can happen if you’re a big enough company and you’ve made your on-premise solution automated enough to justify the upkeep.

• You’re big enough that it makes financial sense not to pay to the middle man. One example is Dropbox who aren’t in the cloud. They did the math and it makes sense for them to be on-premise.

Hybrid cloud solution

The big cloud providers allow you to install a fully operational cloud server on-premise. That is, you’ll have an AWS or Azure portal installed in your own data center. Pretty crazy concept and not for everyone, especially due to the cost. Both Azure Stack and AWS Outposts require you to buy new customized hardware. Google recently released Anthos, which doesn’t require customized hardware.

Comparing Cloud Service Providers

Cloud services are divided into 3 categories: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). To deploy our web application, we’re interested in IaaS. The three dominant IaaS cloud providers are: Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Besides, it’s worth mentioning IBM Cloud, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute, Red Hat Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

Besides AWS, Azure, and GCP, the only real competitor in terms capabilities is Alibaba. Unfortunately for them, major western enterprises are not so willing to work with a Chinese company.

The 3 big cloud providers have somewhat similar offerings. They all offer services like Scalable Virtual Machines, Load balancers, Kubernetes orchestrators, serverless offerings, storage as a service, database as a service, private networks & isolation, big data services, machine learning services, and many more.

Competition is fierce. Prices are somewhat similar and when one of the providers comes up with a new popular product, the other providers will adjust and offer similar products.