Using cloud model to deploy the applications has become a major trend in the recent years. Developers deploy their applications on top of the infrastructure as a service providers, considering its advantages.
Information outside
Software as a Service (SaaS) providers rely on the Infrastructure as a Service providers for their hardware requirements, in many cases. Having a private cloud set up on their own servers is yet another choice, where they deploy their SaaS solutions in their own servers. Hybrid cloud setup comprises of the best of both the worlds - private and public clouds.
Cloud outages and Server unavailability
When hosting your applications over a simple Infrastructure as a Service, you will have to consider the IaaS provided as you would consider your local single hard drive. Redundancy should be considered to mitigate the risk for the availability, as you would, in case of the local hardware in place. Recent outage faced with the Amazon infrastructure has invoked many cloud developers to think more in terms of developing so as to withstand the failures. What is your backup plan to ensure the availability during such outages or how are you going to handle the situation when an infrastructure or the platform provider leaves the business altogether? You have to have proper migration plan and backups for that. Multiple availability zones and having lesser dependency over the infrastructure or the platform should be considered.
Security Issues
In the cloud, you are on your own to find the ways of securing your applications from the attacks, though the infrastructure vendors have their measures in protecting the data, platform or the applications deployed on top of them. Security vulnerabilities may be higher in IaaS, than in a local hard-drive. When using IaaS in its purest form, customer has the responsibility to implement his own security solutions for his control objectives. Here Platform as a Service comes handy, where it takes care of the security solutions that are common to all the software applications. Hence the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) developer doesn't need to bother about the recurring security and availability issues for each of the software being deployed on top of the infrastructure. Rather, a platform handles all the issues that should be taken care of, and let the software as a service developer focus solely on the application itself, than considering mitigating the issues that might occur due to the inherent concerns of the cloud.
Privacy and legal issues
Data of your business are legally bound, and care should be taken such that deploying it on cloud will not compromise any legal requirements. In most of the cases, infrastructure providers have the control over your information, and legal and state entities of the host country may have control over your information even without your knowledge, which is highly unlikely, when you are having your data in your own data servers, private cloud, or local network of computers.
Vendor lock-in
On the other hand, coding for a platform minimizes the vendor lock-in than coding for a particular infrastructure. However we should also note the risk of a vendor lock-in by the PaaS provider, where they require proprietary service interfaces or development languages. Platforms should adhere to the standards such that the migration between multiple platforms won't be of much of a task for the SaaS developers, unlike migrating between the infrastructures.
Flexibility
Rapidly evolving applications often require more flexibility in the PaaS offerings. Platform-as-a-Service should provide more flexibility than an Infrastructure-as-a-Service can provide.
Let's look at an example Platform-as-a-Service, and see how does that provides the required flexibility. WSO2 Carbon incorporates the accepted standards as a lean middleware platform, and as WSO2 Stratos is WSO2 Carbon platform as a service, it has the advantages inherent to the award winning WSO2 Carbon. Above all, WSO2 Carbon as well as WSO2 Stratos is open source, and free to extend, without any hidden fees for licensing, hence this eliminates the fear of being locked before trying, while providing the required flexibility to suit the needs of the sophisticated SaaS developers in the enterprise.
Loss of Control / Freedom
As we move towards the cloud, the cloud providers decide themselves in many cases, what are the services to offer or what services will be compatible with their offering. Unlike in servers in-house, as you move your data centers and servers to be on cloud, you almost lose the control over them to the cloud providers, not to mention, the privacy and security risks that may occur due to that. This leads to the third party controlling your applications.
The vendor of the IaaS or the platform has control over the applications provided or supported, or even whether they allow the external developers to write new applications to their infrastructure or platform. A platform that facilitates the extensibility of the cloud comes to the rescue in this place. If the platform supports installing or deploying multiple software applications or configure and update the existing applications, that would mitigate the above said short coming for a considerable extent.
Infrastructure expertise
When software are developed considering the infrastructure in mind, they often require the expertise for the particular infrastructure provider, let it be Amazon EC2 Cloud or Rackspace. Migrating for another infrastructure provider will need code level changes in many cases. While consuming the fruits of the scalability and the pay-as-you-go model of the cloud, this includes an additional overhead from the software application developers' point of view. Platform as a Service providers invest on this, by delegating the need to code for the underline infrastructure to themselves, away from the SaaS developers.
More Portability
While some of the PaaS such as Windows Azure rely completely on their own infrastructure, platforms including WSO2 Stratos are designed to function on any of the infrastructure. In this case, as the infrastructure level issues related to the portability are handled by the PaaS layer, the SaaS developers are freed from the burden of coding for multiple infrastructures. This is analogous to the well-known programming challenge - coding for multiple operating system APIs.
An extra bit of work
Those existing applications that work amazingly well on the standard computers or the servers are to be work on the new cloud model. Are they cloud-ready? In other words, can they work over the cloud, as they worked in the non-cloud environment? Ideally, making an application that was written without the cloud in mind needs some extra bit of work to make it utilize the cloud. Coding a new application having cloud in mind is a different consideration altogether, where SaaS model comes. But porting the applications to a cloud infrastructure needs the know-hows on elasticity, load balancing, and auto-scaling, which come as the fruits of the cloud. Platform as a Service vendors promise a smooth deployment of your existing applications into their platform, with lesser or no effort.
Information outside
Software as a Service (SaaS) providers rely on the Infrastructure as a Service providers for their hardware requirements, in many cases. Having a private cloud set up on their own servers is yet another choice, where they deploy their SaaS solutions in their own servers. Hybrid cloud setup comprises of the best of both the worlds - private and public clouds.
Cloud outages and Server unavailability
When hosting your applications over a simple Infrastructure as a Service, you will have to consider the IaaS provided as you would consider your local single hard drive. Redundancy should be considered to mitigate the risk for the availability, as you would, in case of the local hardware in place. Recent outage faced with the Amazon infrastructure has invoked many cloud developers to think more in terms of developing so as to withstand the failures. What is your backup plan to ensure the availability during such outages or how are you going to handle the situation when an infrastructure or the platform provider leaves the business altogether? You have to have proper migration plan and backups for that. Multiple availability zones and having lesser dependency over the infrastructure or the platform should be considered.
Security Issues
In the cloud, you are on your own to find the ways of securing your applications from the attacks, though the infrastructure vendors have their measures in protecting the data, platform or the applications deployed on top of them. Security vulnerabilities may be higher in IaaS, than in a local hard-drive. When using IaaS in its purest form, customer has the responsibility to implement his own security solutions for his control objectives. Here Platform as a Service comes handy, where it takes care of the security solutions that are common to all the software applications. Hence the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) developer doesn't need to bother about the recurring security and availability issues for each of the software being deployed on top of the infrastructure. Rather, a platform handles all the issues that should be taken care of, and let the software as a service developer focus solely on the application itself, than considering mitigating the issues that might occur due to the inherent concerns of the cloud.
Privacy and legal issues
Data of your business are legally bound, and care should be taken such that deploying it on cloud will not compromise any legal requirements. In most of the cases, infrastructure providers have the control over your information, and legal and state entities of the host country may have control over your information even without your knowledge, which is highly unlikely, when you are having your data in your own data servers, private cloud, or local network of computers.
Vendor lock-in
On the other hand, coding for a platform minimizes the vendor lock-in than coding for a particular infrastructure. However we should also note the risk of a vendor lock-in by the PaaS provider, where they require proprietary service interfaces or development languages. Platforms should adhere to the standards such that the migration between multiple platforms won't be of much of a task for the SaaS developers, unlike migrating between the infrastructures.
Flexibility
Rapidly evolving applications often require more flexibility in the PaaS offerings. Platform-as-a-Service should provide more flexibility than an Infrastructure-as-a-Service can provide.
Let's look at an example Platform-as-a-Service, and see how does that provides the required flexibility. WSO2 Carbon incorporates the accepted standards as a lean middleware platform, and as WSO2 Stratos is WSO2 Carbon platform as a service, it has the advantages inherent to the award winning WSO2 Carbon. Above all, WSO2 Carbon as well as WSO2 Stratos is open source, and free to extend, without any hidden fees for licensing, hence this eliminates the fear of being locked before trying, while providing the required flexibility to suit the needs of the sophisticated SaaS developers in the enterprise.
Loss of Control / Freedom
As we move towards the cloud, the cloud providers decide themselves in many cases, what are the services to offer or what services will be compatible with their offering. Unlike in servers in-house, as you move your data centers and servers to be on cloud, you almost lose the control over them to the cloud providers, not to mention, the privacy and security risks that may occur due to that. This leads to the third party controlling your applications.
The vendor of the IaaS or the platform has control over the applications provided or supported, or even whether they allow the external developers to write new applications to their infrastructure or platform. A platform that facilitates the extensibility of the cloud comes to the rescue in this place. If the platform supports installing or deploying multiple software applications or configure and update the existing applications, that would mitigate the above said short coming for a considerable extent.
Infrastructure expertise
When software are developed considering the infrastructure in mind, they often require the expertise for the particular infrastructure provider, let it be Amazon EC2 Cloud or Rackspace. Migrating for another infrastructure provider will need code level changes in many cases. While consuming the fruits of the scalability and the pay-as-you-go model of the cloud, this includes an additional overhead from the software application developers' point of view. Platform as a Service providers invest on this, by delegating the need to code for the underline infrastructure to themselves, away from the SaaS developers.
More Portability
While some of the PaaS such as Windows Azure rely completely on their own infrastructure, platforms including WSO2 Stratos are designed to function on any of the infrastructure. In this case, as the infrastructure level issues related to the portability are handled by the PaaS layer, the SaaS developers are freed from the burden of coding for multiple infrastructures. This is analogous to the well-known programming challenge - coding for multiple operating system APIs.
An extra bit of work
Those existing applications that work amazingly well on the standard computers or the servers are to be work on the new cloud model. Are they cloud-ready? In other words, can they work over the cloud, as they worked in the non-cloud environment? Ideally, making an application that was written without the cloud in mind needs some extra bit of work to make it utilize the cloud. Coding a new application having cloud in mind is a different consideration altogether, where SaaS model comes. But porting the applications to a cloud infrastructure needs the know-hows on elasticity, load balancing, and auto-scaling, which come as the fruits of the cloud. Platform as a Service vendors promise a smooth deployment of your existing applications into their platform, with lesser or no effort.
